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THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT
OF RELIGION AS STUDIED
IN SAINT CATHERINE OF
GENOA AND HER FRIENDS
By BARON FRIEDRICH VON HÜGEL
MEMBER OF THE CAMBRIDGE PHILOLOGICAL SOCUTY
HON. LL.D. (ST. ANDREWS), HON. D.D. (OXFORD)
. III}fi1:TI1:
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J.'Y
1
VOLUME SECOND
CRITICAL STUDIES
LONDON: J. M. DENT & SONS
NEW YORK: E. P. DUTTON & CO.
MCMXXVII
First Edition. December 19 0 8
Reprinted March 1909
Second Edition 1923
Repritited 1927
PrInted in Great Britain
CONTENTS OF THE SECOND VOLUME
THE frontispiece consists of a reduced facsimile, in photogravure. of
a lithograph by F. Scotto, entitled liVen. Batt&. Vernazza," which was
printed and owned by the firm of Gervasoni, and which appeared in the
large 4to volume, Ritratti, ed Elogi di Liguri Illustri, with the text printed
by Ponthenier, all in Genoa. This book was published there. in monthly
parts, from 1823 to 1830. Scotto's highly characteristic lithograph no
doubt reproduces an authentic likeness; and probably the original portrait
was, in the first instance, owned by the Canonesses of S. Maria delle
Grazie, Battista.s own convent in Genoa. The picture now in the posses-
sion of the Nuns of S. Maria in Passione. the successors of those Canonesses.
is of a quite conventional, secondary type.
P ART IlL-CRITICAL
PAGB
CHAPTER IX.-PSYCHO-PHYSICAL AND TEMPERAMENTAL
QUESTIONS
Introductory
I. Catherine's Third Period, 1497-1510
II. Conclusions concerning Catherine's Psycho-Physical Con-
dition during this Last Period .
III. Catherine's Psycho-physical Condition, its Likeness and
Unlikeness to Hysteria
IV. First Period of Catherine's Life, 1447-1477. in its Three
Stages .
V. The Second, Great Middle Period of Catherine's Life.
1477- 1 499
VI. Three Rules which seem to Govern the Relations be-
tween Psycho-physical Peculiarities and Sanctity in
General.
VII. Perennial Freshness of the Great Mystics' Main Spiritual
Test, in Contradistinction to their Secondary. Psycho-
logical Contention. Two Special Difficulties
CHAPTER X.-THE MAIN LITERARY SOURCES OF CATHE-
RINE'S CONCEPTIONS
Introd uctory
I. The Pauline Writings: the Two Sources of their Pre-
conversion Assumptions; Catherine's Preponderant
Attitude towards each Position
II. The J ohannine Writings
III. The Areopagite Writings
IV. Jacopone da Todi's .. Lode"
V. Points common to all Five Minds; and Catherine's Main
Difference from her Four Predecessors
V
3- 61
3-9
9- 1 3
14- 21
22-27
28-3
3 2 -4 0
40-47
47- 61
62-110
62.63
63-79
79-9 0
90-101
102-110
110
VI
CONTENTS
CHAPTER XI.--CATHERINE'S LESS ULTIMATE THIS-WORLD
DOCTRINES
Introductory
I. Interpretative Religion
II. Dualistic Attitude towards the Body
III. Quietude and Passivity. Points in this Tendency to be
considered here
IV. Pure Love. or Disinterested Religion: its Distinction
from Quietism
CHAPTER XII.-THE AFTER-LIFE PROBLEMS AND DOCTRINES.
I. The Chief Present-day Problems, Perplexities, and Re-
quirements with Regard to the After-Life in General .
II. Catherine's General After-Life Conceptions
III. Catherine and Eternal Punishment
IV. Catherine and Purgatory
V. Catherine and Heaven-Three Perplexities to be con-
sidered .
- CHAPTER XIII.-THE FIRST THREE ULTIMATE QUESTIONS
I. The Relations between Morality and Mysticism, Philo-
sophy and Religion
II. Mysticism and tbe Limits of Human Knowledge and
Experience
III. Mysticism and the Question of Evil
CHAPTER XIV.-THE Two FINAL PROBLEMS: MYSTICISM
AND PANTHEISM. THE IMMANENCE OF GOD. AND
SPIRITUAL PERSONALITY, HUMAN AND DIVINE.
Introductory
I. Relations between the General and the Particular. God
and Individual Things, according to Aristotle. the Neo-
Platonists, and the Medieval Strict Realists
II. Relations between God and the Human Soul
III. Mysticism and Pantheism: their Differences and Points
of Likeness
IV. The Divine Immanence; Spiritual Personality
CHAPTER XV.-SUMMING-UP OF THE WHOLE BOOK. BACK
Or THROUGH ASCETICISM, SOCIAL RELIGION. AND THE
SCIENTIFIC HABIT OF MIND. TO THE MYSTICAL ELE-
MENT OF RELIGION
I. Asceticism and Mysticism
II. Social Religion and Mysticism
III. The Scientific Habit and Mysticism
IV. Final Summary and Return to the Starting-point of the
\\Thole Inquiry: the Necessity. and yet the Almost
Inevitable Mutual Hostility, of the Three Great Forces
of the Soul and of the Three Corresponding Elements
of Religion
INDEX
PAGE
111-18I
111,112
112-121
121-1 2 9
12 9- 1 5 2
15 2 - 181
182- 2 5 8
182-199
199-218
218- 2 3 0
230- 2 4 6
246- 2 5 8
259-3 08
259- 2 75
275- 2 9 0
29 0 -3 08
3 0 9-34 0
3 0 9,3 10
3 1 0-3 1 9
3 1 9-3 2 5
3 2 5-335
336-34 0
34 1 -39 6
34 1 -35 1
35 1 -3 66
3 6 7-3 86
3 8 7-39 6
397-4 22
PART III
CRITICAL
VOL. II.
Ð
THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT
OF RELIGION
GRAPTER IX
PSYCHO-PHYSICAL AND TEMPERAMENTAL QUESTIONS
INTRODUCTORY.
I. Plan of Part Three.
The picture of Catherine's life and teaching which was
attempted in the previous volume will, I hope, have been
sufficiently vivid to stimulate in the reader a desire to try and
go deeper, and to get as near as may be to the driving forces,
the metaphysical depths of her life. And yet it is obvious
that, if we would understand something of these, we must pro-
ceed slo\vlyand thoroughly, and must begin \vith comparatively
superficial questions. Or rather, we must begin by studying
her temperamental and psycho-physical endowment and con-
dition, and then the literary influences that stimulated and
helped to mould these things, as though all this were not
secondary and but the material and occasion of the forces and
self-determinations to be considered later on.
2. Defects of ancient psycho-Physical theory.
Now as to those temperamental and neural matters, to
\vhich this chapter shall be devoted, the reader \vill, no doubt
long ago, have discovered that it is precisely here that not a
little of the VÜa e Dottrina is faded and \vithered beyond
recall, or has even become positively repulsive to us. The
constant assumption, and frequent explicit insistence, on the
part of more or less all the contributors, upon the immediate
and separate significance, indeed the directly miraculous
character, of certain psycho-physical states-states which,
taken thus separately, would now be inevitably classed as
most explicable neural abnormalities,-all this atmosphere of
nervous high-pitch and tremulousness has now become a
3
4 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
matter demanding a difficult historical imagination and
magnanimity, if we would be just to those who held such
views, and would thus benefit to the full from these past
positions and misconceptions.
Thus when we read the views of perhaps all her educated
attendants: "this condition, in which her body remained
alive without food or medicine, was a supernatural thing." ;
" her state was clearly understood to be supernatural when,
in so short a time, so great a change was seen"; and" she
became yellow all over,-a manifest sign that her humanity
was being entirely consumed in the fire of divine love" : 1
we feel indeed that we can no more foHow. And when we
read, as part of one of the late additions, the worthless legends
gathered from, or occasioned by, the uneducated Argentina:
" in proof that she bore the stigmata within her,-on putting
her hands in a cup of cold water, the latter became so boiling
hot that it greatly heated the very saucer beneath it " : 2 we
are necessarily disgusted. And when, worst of all, she is
made, by a demonstrable, probable double misinterpretation
of an externally similar action, to burn her bare arm with a
live charcoal or lighted candle, with intent to see which fire,
this external one or that interior one of the divine love, were
the greater: 3 we can, even if we have the good fortune of
being able, by means of the critical analysis of the sources, to
put this absurd story to the discredit of her eulogists, but feel
the pathos of such well-meant perversity, which took so sure a
way for rendering ridiculous one who, take her all in all, is so
truly great. 4
3. Slow growth of Neurology.
We should, of course, be very patient in such matters: for
psycho-physical knowledge was, as yet, in its very infancy,
witness the all-important fact that the nerves were, in our
modern sense of the term, still as unknown as they were to
the whole of Græco-Roman antiquity, with which" neuron II
and "nervus" ever meant ccmuscle" or" ligament" and, deriva-
1 Vita, pp. 143b; 149 b . 159 b ; 153 a . a Ibid. p. I53 C .
8 Ibid. pp. I29C. 134 a .
t I have already traced the steps in the growth of this legend. It is no
doubt this element in the biography which irritated John Wesley, the
man of absolute judgments; although he himself. with shrewd good
sense. indicates its possible secondary origin. "I am sure this was a
fool of a Saint; that is, if it was not the folly of her historian, who has
aggrandized her into a mere idiot" (Journal, ed. P. L. Parker, London.
19 0 3).
PSYCHO-PHYSICAL AND TEMPERA
IENTAL 5
tively, U energy," but never consciously what they now mean
in the strict medical sense. Thus the Vita (1551) writes:
lC There remained no member or muscle (nervo) of her body
that was not tormented by fire within it "; lC one rib was
separated from the others, with great pains in the ligaments
(nervi) and bones"; and lC all her body was excruciated and
her muscles (nervi) were tormented" : 1 where, in the first and
last case, visible muscular convulsive movements are clearly
meant. St. Teresa, in her own Life (1561 or 1562), writes:
lC Nervous pains, according to the physicians, are intolerable;
and all my nerves were shrunk"; and lC if the rapture lasts,
all the nerves are made to feel it." 2 Even Fénelon (died 1715)
can still write of the human body: U The bones sustain the
flesh which envelops them; the nerves" (ligaments, minor
muscles) U which are stretched along them, constitute all their
strength; and the muscles, by inflation and elongation at the
points where the nerves are intertwined with them, produce
the most precise and regular movements." 3 Here the soul
acts directly upon the muscles, and, through these and their
dependent ligaments, upon the bones and the flesh.
4. Permanent values of the ancient theory.
And yet that old position with regard to the rarer psycho-
physical states has a right to our respectful and sympathetic
study.
For one thing, we are now coming again to recognize, more
and more, how real and remarkable are certain psycho-
physical states and facts, whether simply morbid or fruitfully
utilized states, so long derided, by the bulk of Scientists, as
mere childish legend or deliberate imposture; and to see how
natural, indeed inevitable it was, that these, at that time quite
inexplicable, things should have been attributed to a direct
and discontinuous kind of Divine intervention. We, on our
part, have then to guard against the Philistinism both of the
Rationalists and of the older Supernaturalists, and will neither
measure our assent to facts by our ability to explain them,
nor postulate the unmediated action of God wherever our
powers of explanation fail us. On this point we have admir-
able models of sympathetic docility towards facts, in the
\vorks of Prof. Pierre Janet, in his medico-psychological
1 Vita, pp. 127c, I43b, I44 b .
z L
ïe, tr. by D. Lewis, London. ed. 1888. pp. 27, 420.
3 Existence de Dieu. I. I. 31: æuvres. ed. Versailles. 1820. Vol. I.
p. 51.
6 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
investigations of present-day morbid cases; of Hermann
Gunkel and Heinrich Weinel, in their examination of mostly
healthy psycho-physical phenomena in early Christian times
and writings; and of William James, in his study of instances
of various kinds, both past and present.!
And next, these (at first sight physical) phenomena are
turning out, more and more, to be the direct or indirect conse-
quence of the action of mind: no doubt, in the first instance,
of the human mind, but still of mind, both free-willing and
automatically operative. And at the same time this action
is, more and more, seen to be limited and variously occasioned
by the physical organism, and to be accompanied or followed,
in a determinist fashion, by certain changes in that organism.
Yet if we have now immeasurably more knowledge than men
had, even fifty years ago, of this latter ceaselessly active,
limiting, occasioning influence of the body upon the mind, we
have also immeasurably more precise and numerous facts
and knowledge in testimony of the all but boundless effect of
mind over body. Here, again, Prof. Janet's writings, those
of Alfred Binet, and the Dominican Père Coconnier's very
sensible book register a mass of material, although of the
morbid type. 2
And further, such remarkable peripheral states and
phenomena are getting again to be rightly looked for in at
least some types of unusual spiritual insight and power
(although such states are found to be indicative, in exact
proportion to the spiritual greatness of their subject, of a
substantially different mental and moral condition of soul).
\Vitness again the Unitarian Prof. James's Varieties, and the
Church-Historical works of the Broad Lutheran German
scholars Weinel, Bemouilli, and Duhm. 3
And lastly, the very closeness with which modern experi-
men tal and analytical psychology is exploring the phenomena
1 Pierre Janet. Automatisme Psychologique. ed. 1903; Etat Mental
des Hystériques, 2 vols., 1892, 1893. Hermann Gunkel, Die W'irkungen
des hâligen Geistes. Göttingen. 1899. Heinrich Weinel. Die TVirkungen
des Geistes und der Geister. Freiburg, 1899. William James, The VarÙties
of Religious Experience. London, 1902.
Z Pierre Janet. Ope cit. Alfred Binet. Les Altérations de la Personnalité.
Paris, 1902. M. Th. Coconnier, L'Hypnotisme Franc. Paris, 1897.
a W. James. op. cit., especially pp. 1-25. H. Weinel, Ope cit., especially
pp. 128-137; 161-208. Bernouilli, Die Hez"ligen der Merowinger.
Tübingen, 1900. pp. 2-6. B. Duhm, Das Geheimniss in der Religion,
Tübingen. 1896.
PSYCHO-PHYSICAL AND TEMPERAMENTAL 7
of our consciousness is once more bringing into ever-clearer
relief the irrepressible metaphysical apprehensions and
affirmations involved and implied by the experience of every
human mind, from its first dim apprehension in infancy of
a " something," as yet undifferentiated by it into subjective
and objective, up to its mature and reflective affirmation of
the trans-subjective validity of its U positions," or at least of
its negations-pure scepticism turning out to be practically
impossible. Here we have, with respect to that apprehension,
such admirable workers as Henri Bergson in France, and
Professors Henry Jones and James Ward in England; and,
for this affirmation, such striking thinkers as the French
Maurice Blondel, and the Germans Johannes Volkelt and
Hugo Münsterberg. And Mgr. Mercier of Louvain, now
Cardinal Mercier, has contributed some valuable criticism of
certain points in these positions.!
S. Difficulties of this inquiry.
Now here I am met at once by two special difficulties, the
one personal to myself and to Catherine, and the other one of
method. For, with regard to those three first sets of recent
explorations of a psycho-physical kind, I am no physician at
all, and not primarily a psychologist. And again, in Cathe-
rine's instance, the evidence as to her psycho-physical states is
not, as with St. Teresa and some few other cases, furnished
by writings from the pen of the very person who experienced
them, and it is at all copious and precise only for the period
when she was admittedly ill and physically incapacitated.-
And yet these last thirteen years of her life occupy a most
prominent place in her biography; it is during, and on
occasion of, those psycho-physical states, and largely with
the materials furnished by them, that, precisely in those
years, she built up her noblest legacy, her great Purgatorial
teaching; the illness was (quite evidently) of a predominantly
psychical type, and concerns more the psychologist than
the physician, being closely connected with her particular
temperament and type of spirituality, a temperament and
type to be found again and again among the Saints. All this
1 H. Bergson. Essai sur les Données Immédiates de la Conscience. ed.
18 9 8 . H. Jones, Tlze PhilosoPhy of Lotze, 1895. J. Ward. Naturalism
and Agnosticism. 2 voJs., 1899. M. Blondel, l' Action, 1893. J. Volkelt.
Kant's Erkenntnisstheon.e. 1879; Erfahrung und Denken, 1886. H.
Münsterberg, Psychology and Life. 1899. D. :Mercier. Critérz.ologie
Générale. ed. 1900.
8 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
and more makes it simply impossible for me to shrink from
some study of the matter, and permits me to hope for some
success in attempting, slowly and cautiously, to arrive at
certain general conclusions of a spiritually important kind.
But then there is also the difficulty of method. For if we
begin the study of these psycho-physical peculiarities and
states by judging them from the temperamental and psycho-
logical standpoint, we can hardly escape from treating them,
at least for the moment, as self-explanatory, and hence from
using these our preliminary conclusions about such neural
phenonema as the measure, type, and explanation of and for
all such other facts and apprehensions as our further study of
the religious mind and experience may bring before us. In
this wise, these our psychological conclusions would fUlTIish
not only a negative test and positive material, but also the
exclusive standard for all further study. And such a pro-
cedure, until and unless it were justified in its method, would
evidently be nothing but a surreptitious begging of the
question.- Y et to begin with the fullest analysis of the
elementary and nonnal phenomena of consciousness and of
its implications and inviolable prerequisites, would too readily
land us in metaphysics which have themselves to operate in
and with those immediate and continuous experiences; and
hence these latter experiences, whether normal and healthy,
or, as here, unusual and in part maladif, must be carefully
studied first. We have, however, to guard most cautiously
against our allowing this, our preliminary, analysis and descrip-
tion of psycho-physical states from imperceptibly blocking
the way to, or occupying the ground of, our ultimate analysis
and metaphysical synthesis and explanation. Only this
latter will be able, by a final outward movement from within,
to show the true place and worth of the more or less pheno-
menal series, passed by us in review on our previous inward
movement from without.
6. Threefold division.
I propose, then, in this chapter, to take, as separately as is
compatible with such a method, the temperamental, psycho-
physical side of Catherine's life. I shall first take those last
thirteen years of admitted illness, as those \vhich are alone at
all fully known to us by contemporary evidence.-I shall then
make a jump back to her first period,-to the first sixteen
years up to her marriage, with the next ten years of relaxa-
tion/ and the following four years of her conversion and
PSYCHO-PHYSICAL AND TEMPERAMENTAL 9
active penitence. I take these next, because, of these thirty
years, we have her own late memories, as registered for us
by her disciples, at the time of her narration of the facts
concerned.-And only then, with these materials and instru-
ments thus gathered from after and before, shall I try to
master the (for us very obscure) middle period, and to arrive
at some estimate of her temperamental peripheral condition
during these twenty years of her fullest expansion.- I shall
conclude the chapter by taking Catherine in her general, life-
long temperament, and by comparing and contrasting this
type and modality of spiritual character and apprehension
with the other rival forms of, and approaches to, religious
truth and goodness as these are furnished for us by history.
The ultimate metaphysical questions and valuation are
reserved for the penultimate chapter of my book.
I. GATHERINE'S THIRD PERIOD, 1497 TO 1510.
I. Increasing illness of Catherine's last years.
Beginning with her third and last period (1497-1510), there
can be no doubt that throughout it she was ill and increasingly
so. Her closest friends and observers attest it. It is pre-
sumably Ettore Vernazza who teJIs us, for 1497, (( when she
was about fifty years of age, she ceased to be able to attend
either to the Hospital or to her own house, owing to her great
bodily weakness. Even on Fast-days she was obliged, after
Holy Communion, to take some food to sustain her strength."
Probably Marabotto it is who tells us that, in 1499, H after
twenty-five years she could no further bear her spiritual
loneliness, either because of old age or because of her great
bodily weakness." We hear from a later Redactor that,
H about nine years before her death (i. e. about 1501), there
came to her an infirmity." And then, especially from November
15 0 9, May 1510, and August 1510 onwards, she is declared
and described as more and more ill.! Indeed she herself, both
by her acts and by her words, emphatically admits her
incapacitation. For it is clearly ill-health which drives her to
abandon the Matronship and even all minor continuous work
for the HospitaL In her Wills we find indeed that, as late as
1 Vita, pp. g6c; 117b; 127a; 97c. 133b (dated November II. 1509, in
MSS.); 146b; 148a.
"
10 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
lVlay 21, 1506, she was able to get to the neighbouring
Hospital for Incurables; and that even on November 27,
15 08 , she was U healthy in mind and body." But her Codicil
of January 5, 15 0 3, was drawn up in the presence of nine
witnesses at midnight,-a sure sign of some acute ill-health.
Indeed already on July 23, 1484, she is lying U infirm in bed,
in her room in the \Vomen's quarter of the Hospital, oppressed
with bodily infirmity." 1
2. A bnormal sensations, impressions and moods.
Her attendants are all puzzled by the multitude and
intensity, the mobility and the self-contradictory character
of the psycho-physical manifestations. Perhaps already before
1497 " she would press thorny rose-twigs in both her hands,
and this without any pain"; and so late as about three weeks
before her death U she remained paralyzed (11zanca,)" and no
doubt anaesthetic U in one (the right) hand and in one finger of
the other hand."-Probably again before 1497 U her body could
not," at times, U be moved from the sitting posture without the
application of force." In February or
1arch 15 10 U she could
not move out of her bed"; in August U on some occasions
she could not move the lips or the tongue, or the arms or legs,
unless helped to do so,-especially on the left side,-and this
would, at times, last three or four hours."-In December 1509
" she suffered from great cold," as part of her peculiar con-
dition; on September 4, 1510, U she suffered from great cold
in the right arm." 2
On other occasions she is, on the contrary, intensely hyper-
aesthetic. Some time in February or March 1510, " for a day
and a night, her flesh could not be touched, because of the
great pain that such touching caused her." At the end of
August U she was so sensitive, that it was impossible to touch
her very bedclothes or the bedstead, or a single hair on her
head, because in such case she would cry out as though she
had been grievously wounded."-These states seem to have
1 From my authenticated copies of the original wills in the Archivio di
Stato, Genoa.
\I Vita. pp. 113b, 149c; 143b, 152c; 138b, 155a. Note the parallels in
St. Teresa's Lite, written by herself, tr. D. Lewis, ed. 1888. P. 234: u When
these (spiritual) impetuosities are not very violent, the soul seeks relief
through certain penances; the painfulness of which, and even the shedding
of blood. are no more felt than if the body were dead." P. 30: u I was
unable to move either arm or foot, or hand or head, unless others moved
me. I could move. however, I think. one finger of my right hand:. P. 31 :
II I was paralytic. though getting better. for about three years:.
PSYGHO-PHYSICAL AND TEMPERAMENTAL II
been usually accompanied by sensations of great heat: for
on the former occasion H she seemed like a creature placed
in a great flame of fire"; whilst on the latter H she had her
tongue and lips so inflamed, that they seemed as though
actual fire."
And movement appears to have been more often increased
than diminished. In the last case indeed U she did not move
nor speak nor see; but, when thus immovable, she suffered
more than when she could cry out and turn about in her bed."
But in the former instance H she could not be kept in bed" ;
and in April I5IO U she cried aloud, and could not keep
herself from moving about, on her bed, on hands and feet."-
There are curious localizations of apparently automatic move-
ments. During an attack somewhere in March 15 1 0 U her flesh
was all in a tremble, particularly the right shoulder" ; on later
occasions H an arm, a leg, a hand \vould tremble, and she
\vould seem to have a spasm within her, with all-but-unbroken
acute pains in the flanks, the shoulders, the abdomen, the
feet and the brain." On an earlier occasion U her body
writhed in great distress." On another day U she seemed all
on fire and lost her power of speech, and made signs with her
head and hands." On one day in February or March 1510
H she lost both speech and sight, though not her intelligence" ;
and on September 12 U her sight was so weak, that she could
hardly any further distinguish or recognize her attendants."
-The heat is liable to be curiously localized. Early in
September 1510 H she had a great heat situated in and on
her left ear, which lasted for three hours; the ear was red and
felt very hot to the touch of others."
Various kinds of haemorrhage are not uncommon. On the
last-mentioned occasion bloody urine is passed; bleeding of
the nose, with loss of bile, occurs in December 1509; very
black blood is lost by the mouth, whilst black spots appear all
over her person, on September 12, 1510; and more blood is
evacuated on the following day. In February or March 1510
H there were in her flesh certain places \vhich had become
concave, like as paste looks where a finger has been put into
it." At the end of August 1510 H her skin became saffron-
yellow all over."
Troubles of breathing and of heart-action are frequently
acute. Somewhere about March 1510 " she had such a spasm
in her throat and mouth as to be unable, for about an hour, to
speak or to open her eyes, and that she could hardly regain
12 THE 11YSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
her breath." U Cupping-glasses were applied to her side, to
ease her heart, and lung-action, but with little effect." On
one occasion" she made signs indicative of feeling as though
burning pincers were seizing her heart "; and on a day soon
after U she felt like a hard nail at her hearL" 1
Disturbances of the power of swallowing and of nutrition
are often grave and sudden, and in curious contradiction to
her abnormally acute and shifting longing for and revulsion
from certain specific kinds of food. On .A.ugust 22, 1510,
U she was so thirsty that she felt as though she could drink
up the very ocean" ; {{ yet she could not," in fact, {{ manage to
swallow even one little drop of water." On September 10
H her attendants continuously gave her drinking water; but
she would straightway return it from her mouth." And on
September 12, "whilst her mouth was being bathed, she
exclaimed, { I am suffocating,'-and this because a drop of
water had trickled down her throat-a drop which she was
unable to gulp down." And on a day in August U she saw a
melon and had a great desire to eat it; but hardly did she
have some of it in her mouth, when she rejected it with
intense disgust." So too with odours. A little later, U on
one day the smell of wine would please her, and she would
bathe her hands and face in it with great relish; and next
day she would so much dislike it, that she could not bear to
see or smell it in her room."-And so too with colours. On
September 2 U a physician-friend came to visit her in his
scarlet robes; and she bore the sight a little, so as not to pain
him." But she then declared that she could no longer bear
it; and he went, and returned to her in his ordinary black
1 Hyper-aesthesia and sensation of heat: Vita. pp. I42a. 153a. Increase
of movement: ibid. and pp. 145b. 143a. 153c. 141a. Loss of speech and
sight: pp. 141b. 141C. 159c. Localization of heat: p. 157b. Haemor-
rhages: 138c. 159c. 160a. Concavities and jaundice: pp. 144a. 153a.
Spasms: pp. 143c. 71c. 141C. 142b. Cf. St. Teresa. loco cit. p. 3 0 : II As to
touching me, that was impossible, for I was so bruised that I could not
endure it. They used to move me in a sheet. one holding one end, and
another the other:' P. 31: "I began to crawl on my hands and feet."
P. 263: .. I felt myself on fire: this inward fire and despair. .:' P. 17 :
"The fainting fits began to be more frequent; and my heart was so
seriously affected, that those who saw it were alarmed." P. 27: .. It
seemed to me as if my heart had been seized by sharp teeth." P. 235 :
.. I saw. in the Angel's hand. a long spear of gold. and at the iron's point
there seemed to be a little fire. He appeared to me to be thrusting it at
times into my heart. and to pierce my very entrails. . . . The pain is not
bodily. but spiritual:.
PSYCHO-PHYSICAL AND TEl\;IPERAMENTAL 13
habit. And yet we have seen, from the Inventory of her
effects, that she loved to have vermilion colour upon her bed
and person. 1
And her emotional moods are analogously in tense and
rapidly shifting. In the spring of 15 10 U she cried aloud
because of the great pain: this attack lasted a day and a
night"; in the night of August 10 U she tossed about with
many exclamations"; and at the beginning of September
U she cried out with a loud voice." At other times, she
laughs for joy. So at the end of April U she would laugh
without speaking"; on August II U she fixed her eyes
steadily on the ceiling; and for about an hour she abode all
but immovable, and spoke not, but kept laughing in a very
joyous fashion"; on August 17 great interior jubilation
H expressed itself in merry laughter"; and on the evening of
September 7 U her joy appeared exteriorly in laughter which
lasted, \vith but small interruptions, for some two hours." -And
her entire apparent condition would shift from one such
extreme to the other with extraordinary swiftness. In the
autumn of 1509 U she many times remained as though dead;
and at other times she would appear as healthy,-as though
she had never anything the matter with her." Already in
December 1509 she herself, after much vomiting and loss of
blood, had sent for her Confessor and had declared that U she
felt as though she must die in consequence of these many
accidents." Yet even on September 10, 15 10 , U when she was
not being oppressed and tormented by her accidents (attacks),
she seemed to be in good health; but when she was being
suffocated by them, she seemed as one dead." 2
1 Swallow: Vita, pp. 149c. 150a; 15gb; 159c; 150a. Odours and
colours: 153c, 154b. Cf. St. Teresa, loco cit. p. 27: "I could eat nothing
whatever. only drink. I had a great loathing for food,'. P. 43: "I have
been suffering for twenty years from sickness every morning." P. 3 0 :
.. There was a choking in my throat. . . . I could not swallow even a
drop of water," P. 263: "A sense of oppression, of stifling,'.
\I Exclamations: Vita, pp. 144a, 148b. 155a. Laughter: ibid. 145 c .
14 8b . 149 b . 157 c . Sudden changes of condition: 135b. 138c. 159b. Cf. St.
Teresa, loco cit. pp. 28. 29: .. That very night," Feast of the Assumption.
1537, " my sickness became so acute that, for about four days. I remained
insensible. For a day and a half the grave was open, waiting for my body.
But it pleased Our Lord I should come to myself. I wished to go to
confession at once. Though my sufferings were unendurable, and my
perceptions dull, yet my confession was. I believe. complete. I communi-
cated with many tears."
14 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
II. CONCLUSIONS CONCERNING GATHERINE'S PSYCHO-
PHYSICAL CONDITION DURING THIS LAST PERIOD.
I. Her Ülness not prÙnarily Physical. Her self-diagnosis.
Now we saw, at the beginning of this chapter, how readily
her attendants concluded, from all these extreme, multiple,
swift-changing and self-contradictory states, to their directly
and separately supernatural origin.-And indeed the diagnosis
and treatment of her case showed clearly that it was not
primarily physical. So in the case, probably in November
1509, of the cupping-glasses, when it she got medically treated
for a bodily infirmity, whilst her real trouble was fire of the
spirit"; so with a medicine given to her by the resident
Hospital physician, some time in April 15 10 , It from taking
which she nearly died"; so with Giovanni Boerio's three-
weeks' treatment of her, in May 1510, a treatment which led
to no other results than momentary additional distress; and
so with the declaration of the ten Physicians who, even on
September 10, four days before her death, it could find no
trace of disease in her pulse, secretions, or any other symptom,"
and who consequently abstained from prescribing anything.
And hence, more or less throughout her last nine years, it there
was confusion in the management of her, not on her own part,
but on that of those who served her." 1
For-and these two further points are of primary import-
ance-the tending of her, as distinct from physic, was
throughout held by herself to be of great importance; and
yet this care was declared by her to be often useless or
harmful, owing to the powers of discrimination possessed by
her attendants being as much below their good-will, as her
own knowledge as to the differences between her healthy and
malad-if states exceeded her power of herself acting upon this
knowledge against these sickly conditions. it She would often
appear to be asleep; and would awake from such a state, at
one time, quite refreshed, and, at another time, so limp and
broken down as to be unable to move. Those that served
her knew not how to distinguish one state from the other;
1 Vita, pp. 71C; 145 c ; 147 b ; 159 c . 159 a ; 127a. Cf. St. Teresa. loe.
cit. p. 23: II I was in my sister's house, for the purpose of undergoing
medical treatment-they took the utmost care of my comfort.'. P. 27:
II In two months, so strong were the medicines, my life was nearly worn
out:. If The physicians gave me up: they said I was consumptive:.
PSYCHO-PHYSICAL AND TEMPERAMENTAL 15
and on recovering from an attack of the latter sort, she would
say to them: (Why did you let me continue in that state of
quiet, from which I have all but died? ' " So, on September 5,
H she cried aloud on waking from a state of quiet, which had
appeared to be (healthy) quietude, but had not been so."
And indeed, already on January 10 previous, she had shut
herself off from her Confessor, H because it seemed to her that
he bore with her too much in her sayings and doings."
Yet, at least after this time, Marabotto does oppose her some-
times. Thus on two, somewhat later, occasions she respectively
makes signs, and asks, that Extreme Unction be given her;
but only some four months later did she actually receive it.
In these cases, then, she either had not, even at bottom, a
correct physical self-knowledge; or her requests had been
prompted, at the time, by her secondary, 1naladij consciousness
alone.-When first visited by Boerio, she takes pleasure in
the thought of getting possibly cured by him; but H in the
following night, when great pain came upon her, she reproved
herself, saying, ( You are suffering this, because you allowed
yourself to rejoice without cause.'" But this declaration dis-
tinctly falls short of any necessary implication of a directly
supernatural origin of her malady, as the Vita here will have
it, and but refers, either to the continuance of earthly exist-
ence not deserving such joy, or to her persistent fundamental
consciousness that the phenomena were partly the fruitful,
profitable occasions, and partly the price paid, for the mind's
close intercourse with things divine.
Indeed her (otherwise unbroken) attitude is one, both of
quiet conviction that physic cannot help her, and of gentle
readiness to let the physicians try whatever they may think
worth the trying: so with the cupping-glasses, and the various
examinations and physickings. Especially is this disposition
clear in her short dialogue with Boerio, where, in answer to his
assertion that she ought to beware of giving scandal to all the
world by saying that her infirmity had no need of remedies,
and that she ought to look upon such an attitude as H a kind
of hypocrisy," she declares: H I am sorry if anyone is scandal-
ized because of me; and I am ready to use any remedy for
my infirmity, supposing that it can be found." 1
1 Self-knowledge as to II quietudes": Vita. pp. 15
b. 157 a . Mara-
botto's attitude: 139b; 141C. 143c. 149a. Relations with Boerio: 147 c .
147 b . Cf. St. Teresa. loco cit. p. 86: .. My health bas been much better
since I have ceased to look after my ease and comforts. "
16 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
2. Her preoccupation with the sPiritual suggestions afforded
by the pheno1nena.
It would, indeed, be a grave misreading of her whole
character and habits of mind to think of her as at all
engrossed in her psycho-physical states as such, and as having
ever formally considered and decided that they must either
come directly from God or be amenable to medicine. On the
contrary, she is too habitually absorbed in the consideration
and contemplation of certain great spiritual doctrines and
realitie
, to have the leisure or inclination for any such
questions.-Indeed it is this very absorption in those spiritual
realities which has ended by suggesting, with an extra-
ordinary readiness, frequency and vividness, through her mind
to her senses, and by these back to her mind, certain psycho-
physical images and illustrations for those very doctrines,
until her whole psycho-physical organism has been, all but
entirely, modified and moulded into an apt instrument and
manifestation for and of that world unseen.
Thus, after her greatest psycho-physical and spiritual
experience in November 1509, she declares to Vernazza, when
he urges her to let him write down the graces she has received
from God, that U it would, strictly speaking, be impossible to
narrate those interior things; whilst, of exterior ones, few or
none have happened to me." And she never entirely loses
her mental consciousness in any state not recognized by her-
self as maladif. So, on a day of great psycho-physical trouble
in February or March 1510, U they thought she must expire;
but, though she lost both sight and speech, she never lost her
intelligence." And even on September II and 12, amidst
foodlessness and suffocations, her intelligence still persists.-
In the March previous U her mind appeared to grow daily
in contentment." Some days later, her attendants U saw
how, after an hour of spasm and breathlessness, and then a
great restriction of all her being, she returned to her normal
condition, and addressed many beautiful words to them."
And later on, U her attendants were amazed at seeing a body,
which seemed to be healthy, in such a tormented condition."
But U soon after she laughed and spoke as one in health, and
told them not to distress themselves about her, since she was
very contented; but that they should see to it that they did
much good, since the way of God is very narrow." 1
1 Remark to Vernazza: Vita. pp. 98c. 99a. Persistence of intelligence:
I4 IC ; 159b. c; 143a; 143c; I45b. Cf. St. Teresa. loco cit. p. 4 08 : II She ,.
PSYCHO-PHYSICAL AND TEMPERAMENTAL 17
3. Interaction and mutual suggestion of her sPiritual and
Physical states.
As to the extraordinary closeness and readiness for mutual
response between her sensible impressions and her thoughts
and emotions-her sensations turning, all but automatically,
into religious emotions, and her thoughts and feelings trans-
lating themselves into appropriate psycho-physical states-
we have a mass of interesting evidence.
Thus when, about the end of November 1509, in response
to her seeing, on some wall of the Hospital, a picture of Our
Lord at the Well of Samaria, and to her asking Him for one
drop of that Divine water, U instantly a drop was given to her
which refreshed her within and without." The spiritual idea
and emotion is here accompanied and further stimulated
by the keenest psycho-physical impression of drinking. And
such an impression can even become painful through its ex-
cessive suggestiveness. Thus she herself explains to Maestro
Boerio, on September 2, 1510, that she cannot long bear the
sight of his scarlet robe U because of what it suggests (repre-
sents) to my memory," -no doubt the fire of divine love.
Three days later, on the contrary, (( she mentally saw herself
lying upon a bier, surrounded by many Religious robed in
black," and greatly rejoiced at the sight. Here the very im-
pression of black, the colour of death, will have conveyed,
during this special mood of hers, a downright psycho-physical
pleasure, somewhat as Boerio's reappearance, on the former
occasion, in a black gown, had been a sensible relief to her.
So also with scents. When, certainly after 1499, U she
perceived, on the (right) hand of her Confessor, an odour which
penetrated her very heart," and U which abode \vith her and
restored both mind and body for many days," we have again
a primarily mental act and state which she herself knows well
to be untransferable, even to Don Marabotto himself. Here
the association of ideas was, no doubt, the right hand of the
Priest and her daily reception, by means of it, of the Holy
Eucharist. For the latter, U the Bread from heaven, having
(Teresa herself) "never saw anything with her bodily eyes. nor heard
anything with her bodily ears:' P. 189: II The words of the divine locu-
tions are very distinctly formed; but by the bodily ear they are not
heard." P. 191: II In ecstasy. the memory can hardly do anything at all,
and the imagination is, as it were, suspended." P. 14 2 : II You see and
feel yourself carried away, you know not whither." P. 187: "I fell into
a trance; I was carried out of myself. It was most plain,'.
VOL. II. C
18 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
\vi<hin it all manner of delight," is already connected in her
mind with an impression of sweet odour. U One day, on
receiving Communion, so much odour and sweetness came to
her, that she seemed to herself to be in Paradise." Probably
the love for, and then the disgust at, the smell of wine, was
also connected with her Eucharistic experiences. Certainly
U one day, having received Holy Communion, she was granted
so great a consolation as to fall into an ecstasy, so that when
the Priest wanted to give her to drink from the Chalice (with
unconsecrated wine) she had to be brought back by force to
her ordinary consciousness." Vivid memories of both sets
of psycho-physical impressions are, I think, at work when
she says: U If a consecrated Host were to be given to me
amongst unconsecrated ones, I should be able to distinguish
it by the very taste, as I do wine from water." And as the
sight of red rapidly became painful from the very excess of
its mental suggestiveness, so will the smell of wine have been
both specially dear and specially painful to her. 1
Indeed her psycho-physical troubles possess, for the most
part, a still traceable, most delicate selectiveness as to date,
range, form, combination, and other peculiarities. Thus some
of the most acute attacks coincide, in their date of occurrence
and general character, as the biographers point out, with
special saint's and holy days: so in the night leading into
S1. Lawrence's day, August 9 and 10, 1510; so on the Vigil
of St. Bartholomew's day, August 24; and so in the night
previous to and on the Feast (August 28) of S1. Augustine,
special Patron of her only sister's Order and of the Convent in
which her own Conversion had taken place thirty-seven years
before. Yet we have also seen how that these synchronisms
did not rise to the heights which were soon desired by her
biographers, for we know that she died, not (as they would
1 Picture: Vita, p. 13Sa. Red and black robes: 154b,IS6c. Suggestions
of odour: 118c, I Iga; gc, 8a, gb. Cf. St. Teresa, loco cit. pp. 57. 58: ., One
day. I saw a picture of Christ most grievously wounded: the very sight of
it moved me." P. 247: II I used to pray much to Our Lord for that living
water of which He spoke to the Samaritan woman: I had always a
picture of it with this inscription: · Domine, da mihi aquam:" P. 231 :
.. Once when I was holding in my hand the cross of my rosary, He took
it from me into His own hand. He returned it; but it was then four
large stones incomparably more precious than diamonds: the five wounds
were delineated on them with the most admirable art. He said to me
that for the future that cross would appear so to me always, and so it did.
The precious stones were seen, however, only by myself:'
PSYCHO-PHYSICAL AND TEMPERAMENTAL I9
have it) on the Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross,
September I4, but early on the day following.
Thus too as to her incapacity to swallow and retain food,
we find that, up to the end, with the rarest exceptions of a
directly physical kind, she retained the most complete facility
in receiving Holy Communion: so on September 2, I5Io,
when" all ordinary food was returned, but the Holy Eucharist
she retained without any difficulty" ; and so too on September
4, when, after" lying for close upon twelve hours with closed
eyes, speechless and all but immovable," Marabotto himself
feared to communicate her, but" she made a sign to him, with
a joyous countenance, to have no fear, and she communicated
with ease, and soon after began to speak, owing to the vigour
given to herby the Sacrament." Yet here too the abnormality
is not complete: some ordinary food is retained, now and
then; so, minced chicken, specially mentioned for December
I5 0 9, and on September 3, I5 I o.
As to her heat-attacks and the corresponding extreme-the
sense of intense cold,-it is clear how close is their connection
with her profound concentration upon the conception of God
as Love, and upon the image of Love as fire. It is these
sudden and intense psycho-physical, spiritually suggestive
because spiritually suggested, heat-attacks which are, I think,
always meant by the terms" assault" 'assalto), "stroke"
(ferita), and" arrow" (saetta): terms which already indicate
the mental quality of these attacks. And these heats are
mostly localized in a doctrinally suggestive manner: they
centre in and around the heart, or on the tongue and lips, or
they envelop the whole person" as though it were placed in
a great flame of fire," or "in a glowing furnace." Indeed these
heats are often so described, by her attendants or herself, as to
imply their predominantly psycho-physical nature: "it was
necessary, with a view to prolonging her life, to use many
means for lightening the strain of that interior fire upon her
mind"; and" I feel," she says herself, on occasion of such
an attack, " so great a contentment on the part of the spirit,
as to be unutterable; whilst, on the part of my humanity,
all the pains are, so to say, no pains."
As to her boundless thirst, her inability to drink, and her
sense of strangulation, their doctrinal suggestions are largely
clear. Thus when" she was so thirsty as to feel able to drink
up all the waters of the sea," and when she calls out" I am
suffocating" (drowning, io affogo), we are at once reminded
20 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
of her great saying: "If the sea were all so much love, there
\vould not live man or woman who would not go to drown
himself in it (si affogasse)." And when, at the end of August
1510, unable to drink, she herself declares "all the water that
is on earth could not give me the least refreshment," there is,
perhaps, an implied contrast to that " little drop of divine
water" which had so much refreshed her a year before.
And finally, the various paralyses and death-like swoons
seem, at least in part, to follow from, and to represent, the
death of the spirit to the life of the senses, and to mirror the
intensity with which perfection has been conceived and
practised as " Love going forth out of self, and abiding all in'
God and separated from man." Thus when, on August 22,
1510, " she had a day of great heat, and abode paralyzed in
one hand and in one finger of the other hand for about
sixteen hours, and she was so greatly occupied (absorbed),
that she neither spoke, nor opened her eyes, nor could take
any food." 1
4. Only two cases of sPiritually unsuggestive i1npressions.
It is indeed profoundly instructive to note how that, in
exact proportion as a human-mental mediation and suggestion
of a religious kind is directly traceable or at least probable in
any or all of these things, is that thing also worthy of being
considered as having ultimately the Divine Spirit Itself for its
first cause as well as last end; and that, in exact proportion as
this kind of human mediation and suggestion is impossible
or unlikely, the thing turns out to be unworthy of being
attributed, in any special sense, to the spirit of God Himself.
Of such spiritually opaque, religiously unused and ap-
parently unuseable, hysteriform impressions, I can, even dur-
ing the last days of these nine years of admitted infirmity,
find but two clear instances,-instances which, by their very
1 Synchronisms: Vita. pp. 148b; 150b; 152a. 160c, 16Ib. Communion
and ordinary food: 154a, 154c, 138c; 154c. Heats:" Assalto," e.g. 138b,
c; 143a. c; "ferita" and U saetta," e.g. 141a, c; 145a. Their localization:
135a, 141c; 153a; 142a. 158a. Their psycho-physical character: 13Sb.
144b. Thirst and its suggestion: 149c, 159c; 76c; 152b, 13Sa. Paralyses:
134b; 149c. Cf. St. Teresa, op. cit. p. 28: her death-swoon occurs on
evening of the Assumption. P. 235: Heat, piercing of the heart as by a
spear, and a spiritual (not bodily) pain, are all united in the experience of
the heart-piercing Angel. P. 423: ., Another prayer very common is a
certain kind of wounding; for it really seems to the soul as if an arrow
were thrust through the heart or through itself. The suffering is not one
of sense. nor is the wound physical; it is in the interior of the soul:.
PSYCHO-PHYSICAL AND TEMPERAMENTAL 21
unlikeness to the mass of her spiritually transparent, readily
used impressions, strongly confirm our high estimate of the
all but totality of her psycho-physical states, as experienced
and understood and used by herseJf. On September 7, 1510,
after having seen and wisely utilized the spiritually suggestive
image of " a great ladder of fire," she ends by having so vivid
an hallucination of the whole world being on fire" that she
asked whether it were not so, and caused her windows to be
opened that the facts might be ascertained; and" she abode
the whole night, possessed by that imagination," as the Vita
itself calls this impression. At night, on September II, she
complained of a very great heat, and cast forth from her
mouth very black blood; and black spots came out allover her
body. And on the 13th, " she was seen with her eyes fixed
upon the ceiling, and with much movement of the lips and
hands; and she answered her attendants' queries as to what
she was seeing with 'Drive away that beast. . . .' the
remaining words being inaudible." 1
Here we have, I think, the only two merely factual, un-
suggestive, and hence simply delusive, impressions really
experienced by herself and recorded in the V ita, a book whose
very eagerness to discover things of this kind and readiness
to take them as directly supernatural is a guarantee that
no other marked instances of the kind have been omitted
or suppressed. And these two impressions both take place
within a week of her death, and respectively four days before,
and two days after, the first clear case of organic disease or
lesion to be found anywhere in the life.
1 Vita, pp. Is8a; 160a. Cf. St. Teresa, oþ. cit. p. 41: II We saw some-
thing like a great toad crawling towards us . . . The impression it made
on me was such, that I think it must have had a meaning." Contrast with
this naïvely sensible sight and the absence of all interior assurance, such
a spiritual vision as II Christ stood before me, stern and grave. I saw Him
with the eyes of the soul. The impression remained with me that the
vision was from God, and not an imagination II (pp. 40. 41). Another
quasi-sensible sight. with no interior assurance. or question as to its
provenance and value, is given on pp. 248, 249: .. Once Satan, in an
abominable shape, appeared on my left hand. I looked at his mouth in
particular. because he spoke, and it was horrible. A huge flame seemed
to issue out of his body, perfectly bright without any shadow." Another
such impression is recorded on p. 252: II I thought the evil spirits would
have suffocated me one night. . . I saw a great troop of them rush away
as if tumbling over a precipice:'
22 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
III. CATHERINE'S PSYCHO-PHYSICAL CONDITION, ITS
LIKENESS AND UNLIKENESS TO HYSTERIA.
Only by a quite unfair magnifying or multiplying of the
two incidents just described could we come to hold, with
1\1r. Baring-Gould, that Catherine was simply a sufferer from
hysteria, and that the Roman Church did well to canonize her
on the ground of her having, in spite of this malady, managed
to achieve much useful work amongst the sick and poor.!
Here we shall do well to consider three groups of facts.
I. Misapprehensions as to hysteria.
The first group gives the reasons \vhy we should try and get
rid of the terror and horror still so often felt in connection
with the very name of this malady. This now quite demon-
strably excessive, indeed largely mythical, connotation of the
term springs from four causes.
First, the very name still tends to suggest, as the causes or
conditions of the malady, things fit only for discussion in
medical reviews. But then, ever since 1855, all limitation to,
or special connection with, anything peculiarly female, or
indeed generally sexual, has been increasingly shown to be
false, until now no serious authority on the matter can be
found to espouse the old view. The malady is now well
known to attack men as well as women, and to have no
special relation to things of sex at all. 2
Next, probably as a consequence from the initial error,
this disorder was supposed to come predominantly from, or to
lead to, moral impurity, or at least to be ordinarily accom-
panied by strong erotic propensions. But here the now care-
fully observed facts are imperatively hostile: of the 120 living
cases most carefully studied by Prof. Janet, only four showed
the predominance of any such tendencies, a proportion un-
doubtedly not above the percentage to be found amongst
non-hysterical persons. 3
And again, the term was long synonymous with untruthful-
ness and deceit. But here again Prof. Janet shows how
unfounded is this prejudice, since it but springs from the mis-
1 Lives 01 the Saints. ed. 18981 Vol. XI September 15.
a Pierre Janet. Etat Mental des Hystériques. 2 vols' l Paris, 1892. 1894:
Vol. II. pp. 260, 261; 280; Vol. I. pp. 225. 63.
· Ibid. Vol. I. pp. 63. 225. 226.
PSYCHO-PHYSICAL AND TEMPERAMENTAL 23
placed promptitude with which the earlier observers refused
to believe what they had not as yet sufficiently examined
and could not at all explain, and from the malady being itself
equivalent to a more or less extensive breaking-up of the
normal inter-connection between the several, successive or
simultaneous states, and, as it were, layers of the one person-
ality. He is convinced that real untruthfulness is no com-
moner among such patients than it is among healthy
persons.!
And, finally, it is no doubt felt that, apart from all such
specifically moral suspicions, the malady involves all kinds of
fancies and inaccuracies of feeling and of perception, and that
it frequently passes into downright insanity. And this is no
doubt the one objection which does retain some of its old
cogency. Still, it is well to note that, as has now been fully
established, the elements of the human mind are and remain
the same throughout the whole range of its conditions, from
the sanest to the maddest, whilst only their proportion and
admixture, and the presence or absence and the kind of
synthesis necessary to hold them together differentiate these
various states of mind. In true insanity there is no such
synthesis; in hysteria the synthesis, however slight and
peculiar, is always still traceable throughout the widespread
disgregation of the elements and states. 2 And it is this
very persistence of the fundamental unity, together with
the strikingly different combination and considerable dis-
gregation of its elements, that makes the study of hysteria
so fruitful for the knowledge of the fully healthy mind and of
its unity; whilst the continuance of all the elements of the
normal intelligence, even in insanity, readily explains why it
is apparently so easy to see insanity everywhere, and to treat
genius and sanctity as but so much degeneracy.
2. Hysterifornt Phenomena observable in Catherine's case.
The second group of facts consists in the phenomena which,
in Catherine's case, are like or identical to what is observable
in cases of hysteria.
There is, perhaps above all else, the anaesthetic condition,
which was presumably co-extensive with her paralytic states.
" Anaesthesia," says Prof. Janet, U can be considered as the
type of the other sYlnptoms of hysteria; it exists in the great
majority of cases, it is thoroughly characteristic of the malady.
1 Pierre Janet. Etat Afental. Vol. I. pp. 226. 227.
a Ibid. Vol. II, pp. 253. 257.
24 THE MYSTICAL ELE
I{ENT OF RELIGION
In its most frequent localization (semi-anaesthesia) it affects
one of the lateral halves of the body, and this half is usually
the left side." Or," a finger or hand will be affected." Such
" insensibility can be very frequent and very profound"; but
" it disappears suddenly" and even" varies from one moment
to another." 1
Then there is the corresponding counter-phenomenon of
hyper-aesthesia. "The slightest contact provokes great pains,
exclamations, and spasms. The painful zones have their seat
mostly on the abdomen or on the hips." And" sensation in
these states is not painful in itself, by its own intensity, but by
its quality, its characteristics; it has become the signal, by
association of ideas, for the production of a set of extremely
painful phenomena." So, with the colour-sense: "one patient
adores the colour red, and sees in its dullest shade' sparkling
rays which penetrate to her very heart and warm her through
and through.'" But" another one finds this' a repulsive
colour and one capable of producing nausea.'" And similarly
with the senses of taste and odour. 2
Then, too, the inability to stand or walk, with the conserva-
tion, at times, of the power to crawl; the acceptance, followed
by the rejection, of food, because of certain spasms in the
throat or stomach, and the curious, mentally explicable,
exceptions to this incapacity; the sense, even at other times,
of strangulation; heart palpitations, fever heats, strange
haemorrhages from the stomach or even from the lung; red
patches on the skin and emotional jaundice allover it, and
one or two other peculiarities. 3
Then, as to a particular kind of quietude, from which
Catherine warns her attendants to rouse her, we find a
patient who" ceases her reading, without showing any sign
of doing so. She gets taken to be profoundly attentive; it is,
however, but one of her attacks of 'fixity.' And she has
promptly to be shaken out of this state, or, in a few minutes,
there will be no getting her out of it."
As to Catherine's consciousness of possessing an extra-
ordinary fineness of discrimination between sensibly identical
1 Pierre Janet. Etat Mental. Vol. I. pp. 7. 8. I I, 12. 57. 21.
a Ibid. Vol. II. pp. 82. 91; 70. 71.
a Ibid. Vol. II. Troubles of movement. pp. 105, 106; of nutrition, pp. 285,
70. 7 1 ; strangulation, heart palpitation, fever heats, p. 282; haemorrhages
and red patches. p. 283; jaundice (ictère emotionnel). p. 287; and note the
II isch
rie:' p. 28 3, top, compared with Vita 1 p. 12a.
PSYCHO-PHYSICAL AND TEMPERAMENTAL 25
objects, we see that U if one points out, to some of these
patients, an imaginary portrait upon a plain white card, and
mixes this card with other similar ones, they will almost
always find again the portrait on the same card." And
similarly as to her a ttaching a particular quasi-sensible
perception to Marabotto's hand alone, we find that, if M.
Janet touches Léonie's hand, he having suggested a nosegay
to her, she will henceforth, when he touches the hand, see
that nosegay; whereas, if another person touches that same
hand, Léonie will see nothing special.
As to Catherine's feelings of criminality and of being
already dead, IV!. Janet quotes M., who says, U I am like a
criminal about to be punished"; and R., who declares, U It
seems to me that I am dead." As to the hallucination of a
Beast, Marcelle suffers from the same impression.!
And,-perhaps the most important of all these surface-
resemblances,-there is Catherine's apparent freedom from
all emotion at the deaths of her brothers and sister, and her
extraordinary dependence upon, and claimfulness towards,
her Confessor alone. U These patients rapidly lose the social
feelings: Berthe, who for some time preserved some affection
for her brother, ends by losing all interest in him; Marcelle,
at the very beginning of her illness, separates herself from
everyone." "It is always their own personality which
dominates their thoughts." Yet these patients have U an
extraordinary attachment to their physician. For him they
are resolved to do all things. In return, they are extremely
exacting,-he is to occupy himself entirely with each one
alone. Only a very superficial observer would ascribe this
feeling to a vulgar source." 2
3. Catherine's personality not disintegrated.
But a third group of facts clearly differentiates Catherine's
case, even in these years of avowed ill-health, from such
patients; and these facts become clearer and more numerous
in precise proportion as we move away from peripheral,
psycho-physical phenomena and mechanisms, and dwell upon
her practically unbroken mental and moral characteristics,
and upon the use and meaning, the place and context of
these things within her ample life.
For as to her relations with her attendants, even now it
is still she who leads, who suggests, who influences; a strong
1 Pierre Janet, Etat Mental. Vol. I, p. 140; Vol. II. pp. 14, 72. 165.
Ibid. Vol. I. pp. 218. 219; 1
8, 1:>9.
26 THE
IYSTICAL ELEl\IENT OF RELIGION
and self-consistent will shows itself still, under all this shifting
psycho-physical surface. Thus Don Marabotto now adminis-
ters, it is true, all her money and charitable affairs for her.
But it is she \vho insists, alone and unaided, upon the true
spiritual function of that impression of odour on his hand.-
Vemazza, no doubt, has now to help her in the fight against
subtle scruples, on occasion of her deepest depressions. But
her far more frequent times of light and joy are in nowise
occasions of a simply subjective self-engrossment or of a
purely psycho-physical interest, for her mind is absorbed if
in but a few, yet in inexhaustibly fruitful and universally
applicable ideas and experiences of a spiritual kind, such
as helped to urge this friend on to his world-renewing
impulses and determinations.-Her closest relations and
friends, one must admit, succeed by their action, taken
eighteen months and then again two days before her death,
in getting her to desist from ordering her burial by the side
of her husband. But we have seen, in the one case, how
indirectly, and, in the other case, how suddenly and even then
quite informally, they had to gain their point.-Her attend-
ants in general, and Marabotto in particular, certainly paid
her an engrossed attention, and the all but endlessness of her
superficial fancies and requirements have been chronicled by
them with a naïve and wearisome fulness. But then she
herself is well aware that, had they but the requisite know-
ledge as to ho\v and when to apply them, some sturdy
opposition and a greater roughness of handling would, on
their part, be of the greatest use to her, in this her psychical
infirmity; indeed her shutting herself away from l\Iarabotto,
as late as January 1510, is directly caused by her sense and
fear of being spoilt by him.
It is true again that, already in 1502, we hear, in a probably
exaggerated but still possibly semi-authentic account, of her
indifference of feeling with regard to the deaths of two
brothers and of her only sister; and that, from January 1510
onwards, she gradually excludes all her attendants from her
sick-room, with, eventually, the sole exceptions of lVlarabotto
or Carenzio and Argentina. But her Wills show conclusively
how persistent were her detailed interest in, and dispositions
for, the requirements of her surviving brother, nephews, and
nieces; of poor Thobia and the girl's hidden mother; of her
priest-attendants, and of each and all of her humblest
domestics; of the natives in the far-away Greek Island of
PSYCHO-PHYSICAL AND TEMPERAMENTAL 27
Scios; and, above all, of the Hospital and its great work
which she had ever loved so well.
We have indeed found two cases, both from within the
last week of her life, of mentally opaque and spiritually
unsuggestive and unutilized impressions which are truly
analogous to those characteristic of hysteria. But we have
also seen how forcibly these two solitary cases bring out, by
contrast, the spiritual transparency and fruitfulness of her
usual, finely reflective picturings of these last years. For
here it is her own deliberate and spiritual mind which joyously
greets, and straightway utilizes and transcends, the psycho-
physical occurrences; and it does so, not because these
occurrences are, or are taken to be, the causes or requisites
or objects of her faith and spiritual insight, but because, on
the contrary, they meet and clothe an already exuberant faith
and insight-spiritual certainties derived from quite another
source.
And finally, if the monotony and superficial pettiness of
the sick-room can easily pall upon us, especially when pre-
sented with the credulities and hectic exaggerations which
disfigure so much of the Vita's description of it; we must, in
justice, as I have attempted to do in my seventh and eighth
chapters, count in, as part of her biography, her deep affection
for and persistent influence with Ettore and Battista Vernazza,
and the exemplification of her doctrine by these virile souls,
makers of history in the wide, varied world of men. 1
In a word, it is plain at once that, given the necessarily
limited number of ways in which the psycho-physical
organism reacts under mental stimulations, certain neural
phenomena may, in any two cases, be, in themselves, perfectly
similar, although their respective mental causes or occasions
may be as different, each from the other, as the Moonlight
Sonata of Beethoven, or the working out of the Law of
Gravitation by Newton, or the elaboration of the implications
of the Categorical Imperative by Kant, are different from the
sudden jumping of a live mouse in the face of an hysterically-
disposed young woman, or as the various causes of tears and
laughter throughout the whole world.
1 The biographical chapters of Volume I give all the facts and refer-
ences alluded to in this paragraph. It would be easy to find parallels for
most of these peripheral disturbances and great central normalities in
St. Teresa's life.
28 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
IV. FIRST PERIOD OF CATHERINE'S LIFE, 1447 TO 1477,
IN ITS THREE STAGES.
If we next go back to the first period of her life, in its
three stages of the sixteen years of her girlhood, 1447-1463,
the first ten years of her married life, 1463-1473, and the
four years of her Conversion and active Penitence, 1473-1477,
we shall find, I think, in the matter of temperament and
psycho-physical conditions, little or nothing but a rare degree
of spiritual sensitiveness, and an extraordinary close-knitted-
ness of body and mind.
1. F rOl1
her childhood to her conversion.
Thus, already in her early childhood, that picture of the
Pietà seems to have suggested religious ideas and feelings
with the suddenness and emotional solidity of a physical
seizure-an impression still undimmed when she herself
recounted it, some fifty years later, to her two intimates.-It
is true that during those first, deeply unhappy ten years of
marriage, we cannot readily find more than indications of a
most profound and brooding melancholy, the apparent result
of but two factors,-a naturally sad disposition and acutely
painful domestic circumstances. Yet it is clear, from the
sequel, that more and other things lay behind. It is indeed
evident that she possessed a congenitally melancholy tempera-
ment; that nothing but the rarest combination of conditions
could have brought out, into something like elastic play and
varied exercise, her great but few and naturally excessive
qualities of mind and heart; that these conditions were not
only absent, but were replaced by circumstances of the
most painful kind; and that she will hardly, at this time,
ha ve had even a momen l' s clear consciousness of an y
other sources than just those conditions for her deep, keen,
and ever-increasing dissatisfaction with all things, her own
self included: all peace and joy, the very capacity for either
seemed gone, and gone for ever. But it is only the third
stage, with its sudden-seeming conversion on March 20,
1473, and the then following four years of strenuously active
self-immolation and dedication to the humblest service of
others, which lets us see deep into those previous years of
sullen gloom and apparently hopeless drift and dreary
wastage.
PSYCHO-PHYSICAL AND TEMPERAMENTAL 29
The two stages really belong to one another, and the depth
of the former gloom and dreariness stood in direct proportion
and relation to the capacities of that nature and to the height
of their satisfaction in the later light and vigour brought to
and assimilated by them. I t was the sense, at that previous
time still inarticulate, but none the less mightily operative, of
the insufficiency of all things merely contingent, of all things
taken as such and inevitably found to be such, that had been
adding, and was now discovered to have added, a quite deter-
mining weight and poignancy to the natural pressure of her
temperament and extemallot. And this temperament and
lot, which had not alone produced that sadness, could still less
of themselves remove it, whatever might be its cause. Her
sense of emptiness and impotence could indeed add to her
sense of fulness and of power, once these latter had come;
but of themselves the former could no more give her the
latter, than hunger, which indeed makes bread to taste deli-
cious, can give us real bread and, with it, that delight.
And it was such real bread of life and real power which
now came to her . For if the tests of reaJity in such things
are their persistence and large and rich spiritual applic-
abiJity and fruitfulness, then something profoundly real and
important took place in the soul of that sad and weary
woman of six-and-twenty, within that Convent-chapel, at
that Annunciation-tide. Her four years of heroic persistence;
her unbroken Hospital service of a quarter of a century; her
lofty magnanimity towards her husband, Thobia and Thobia's
mother; her profound influence upon Vernazza, in urging
him on to his splendid labours throughout Italy, and to his
grand death in plague-stricken Genoa; her daringly original,
yet immensely persuasive, doctrine,-nearly all this dates
back, completely for her consciousness and very largely in
reality, to those few moments on that memorable day.
2. Her conversion not sudden nor visionary.
But two points, concerning the manner and form of this
experience, are, though of but secondary spiritual interest, far
more difficult to decide. There is, for one thing, the indubit-
able impression, for her own mind and for ours, of complete
suddenness and newness in her change. Was this suddenness
and newness merely apparent, or real as well? And should
this suddenness, if real" be taken as in itself and directly
supernatural?
Now it is certain that Catherine" up to ten years before"
30 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
had been full of definitely religious acts and dispositions.
Had she not, already at thirteen, wanted to be a Nun, and,
at eight or so, been deeply moved by a picture of the dead
Christ in His l\iother's lap? Hence, ideas and feelings of
self-dedication and of the Christ-God's hatred of sin and love
for her had, in earlier and during longer times than those of
her comparative carelessness, soaked into and formed her
mental and emotional bent, and will have in so far shaped
her will, as to make the later determination along those earJier
lines of its operation, comparatively easy, even after those
years of relaxation and deviation. Yet it is clear that there
was not here, as indeed there is nowhere, any mere repetition
of the past. New combinations and an indefinitely deeper
apprehension of the great religious ideas and facts of God's
holiness and man's weakness, of the necessity for the soul to
reach its own true depth or to suffer fruitlessly, and of God
having Himself to meet and feed this movement and hunger
which He has Himself implanted; new combinations and
depths of emotion, and an indefinite expansion and heroic
determination of the will: were all certainly here, and were
new as compared with even the most religious moments in
the past.
As to the suddenness, we cannot but take it as, in large part,
simply apparent,-a dim apprehension of what then became
clear having been previously quite oppressively with her.
And, in any case, this suddenness seems to belong rather to
the temperamental peculiarities and necessary forms of her
particular experiences than to the essence and content of her
spiritual life. For, whatever she thinks, feels, says or does
throughout her life, she does and experiences with actual
suddenness, or at least with a sense of suddenness; and there
is clearly no more necessary connection between such sud-
denness and grace and true self-renouncement, than there
is between gradualness and mere nature; both suddenness
and gradualness being but simple modes, more or less fixed
for each individual, yet differing from each to each, modes in
which God's grace and man's will interact and manifest
themsel ves in different souls.!
And then there is the question as to whether or not this
1 Prof. W. James has got some very sensible considerations on the
pace of a conversion (as distinct from its spiritual significance. depth.
persistence. and fruitfulness) being primarily a matter of temperament:
Varieties 01 Religious ExperÙnce. 1902, pp. 227- 2 4 0 .
PSYCHO-PHYSICAL AND TEMPERAMENTAL 31
conversion-experience took the form of a vision. We have
seen, in the Appendix, how considerable are the difficulties
which beset the account of the Bleeding Christ Vision in the
Palace; and how the story of the previous visionless ex-
perience in the Chapel is free from all such objections. But,
even supposing the two accounts to be equally reliable, it is
the first, the visionless experience, which was demonstrably
the more important and the more abidingly operative of the
two. More important, for it is during those visionless
moments that her conversion is first effected; and more
abiding, for, according to all the ancient accounts, the im-
pression of the Bleeding Christ Vision disappeared utterly at
the end of at longest four years, whereas the memory of
the visionless conversion moments remained with her, as an
operative force, up to the very last. Witness the free self-
casting of the soul into painful-joyous Purgation, into Love,
into God (without any picturing of the historic Christ),
which forms one of the two constituents of her great latter-
day teaching; and how entirely free from directly historic
elements all her recorded visions of the middle period turn
out to be. l
3. Peculiarities of her active þenitence.
As to the four years of Active Penitence, we must beware
of losing the sense of the dependence, the simple, spontaneous
instrumentality, in which the negative and restrictive side of
her action stood towards the positive and expansive one. An
immense affirmation, an anticipating, creative buoyancy and
resourcefulness, had come full flood into her life; and had
shifted her centre of deliberate interest and willing away from
the disordered, pleasure-seeking, sore and sulky lesser self in
1 By the term H visionless." I do not mean to affirm anything as to the
presence or absence of ideas or mental images during the times so de-
scribed, but to register the simple fact, that, for her own memory after
the event, she was, at the time. without anyone persistent. external-
seeming image.-Note how St. Ignatius Loyola in his Testament, ed.
London, 1900, pp. 91, 92, considered the profoundest spiritual experi-
ence of his life to have been one unaccompanied or expressed by any
vision: II On his way" to a Church near :Manresa. II he sat down facing
the stream, which was running deep. While he was sitting there, the eyes
of his mind were opened," not so as to see any kind of vision, but II so as
to understand and comprehend spiritual things. . . with such clearness
that for him all these things were made new. If all the enlightenment
and help he had received from God in the whole course of his life. . .
were gathered together in one heap. these all would appear less than he
had been given at this one time."
32 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
which her true personality had for so long been enmeshed.
Thus all this strenuous work of transforming and raising
her lower levels of inclinations and of habit to the likeness
and heights of her now deliberate loftiest standard was not
taking place for the sake of something which actually was,
or which even seemed to be, less than what she had possessed
or had, even dimly, sought before, nor with a view to her true
self's contraction. But, on the contrary, the work was for the
end of that indefinite More, of that great pushing upwards
of her soul's centre and widening out of its circumference,
which she could herself confirm and increase only by such
ever-renewed warfare against what she now recognized as her
false and crippling self.
And it is noticeable how soon and how largely, even still
\vithin this stage, her attitude became H passive." She pretty
early came to do these numerous definite acts of penance
without any deliberate selection or full attention to them.
As in her third period her absorption in large spiritual ideas
spontaneously suggests certain corresponding psycho-physical
phenomena, which then, in return, stimulate anew the appre-
hensions of the mind; so here, towards the end of the first
period, penitential love ends by quite spontaneously suggest-
ing divers external acts of penitence, which readily become so
much fresh stimulation for love.
I take this time to have been as yet free from visions or
ecstasies-at least of the later lengthy and specific type.
For the Bleeding Christ experience, even if funy historical,
occurred within the first conversion-days, and only its vivid
memory prolonged itself throughout those penitential years;
whilst alJ such other visions, as have been handed down to us,
do not treat of conversion and penance, at least in any active
and personal sense. And only towards the end of these years
do the psycho-physical phenomena as to the abstention from
food begin to show themselves. The consideration of both
the Visions and the Fasts had, then, better be reserved for
the great central period.
v. THE SECOND, GREAT MIDDLE PERIOD OF GATHERINE'S
LIFE, 1477 TO 1499.
It is most natural yet very regrettable that we should know
so little as to Catherine's spiritual life, or even as to her
PSYCHO-PHYSICAL AND TEMPERAMENTAL 33
psycho-physical condition, during these central twenty-two
years of her life. It is natural, for she had, at this time"
neither Physician nor Confessor busy with her, and the very
richness and balanced fulness of this epoch of her life may
well have helped to produce but little that could have been
specially seized and registered by either. Yet it is regret-
table, since here we have what" at least for us human
observers, constitutes the culmination and the true measure
of her life, the first period looking but like the preparation,
and the third period, like the price paid for such a rich
expansion.-Yet we know something about three matters of
considerable psycho-physica] and temperamental interest,
which are specially characteristic of this time: her attitude
towards food; her ecstasies and visions; and certain peculi-
arities in her conception and practice of the spiritual warfare.
I. Her extraordinary fasts.
As to food, it is clear that" however much we may be able
or bound to deduct from the accounts, there remains a solid
nucleus of remarkable fact. During some twenty years she
evidently went, for a fairly equal number of days,-some thirty
in Advent and some forty in Lent, seventy in all annuallY'-
with all but no food; and was, during these fasts, at least as
vigorous and active as when her nutrition was normal. For
it is not fairly possible to make these great fasts end much
before I496, when she ceased to be Matron of the Hospital;
and they cannot have begun much after 1475 or 1476: so
that practically the whole of her devoted service and ad-
ministration in and of that great institution fell within these
years, of which well-nigh one-fifth was covered by these all
but total abstentions from food. Yet here again we are
compelled to take these things, not separately, and as directly
supernatural, but in connection with everything else; and to
consider the resultant whole as the effect and evidence of
a strong mind and will operating upon and through an
immensely responsive psycho-physical organism.
For here again we easily find a significant system and
delicate selectiveness both in the constant approximate
synchronisms-these incapacities occurring about Advent
and Lent; and in the foods exempted-since there is no
difficulty in connection with the daily Holy Eucharist, with
the unconsecrated wine given to her, as to all Communicants
in that age at Genoa, immediately after Communion" or with
water when seasoned penitentially with salt or vinegar. And
VOL. II. D
34 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
if the actual heightening of nervous energy and balance"
recorded as having generally accompanied these two fasts" is
indeed a striking testimony te> the extraordinary powers of
her mind and will, \ve must not forget that these fruitful fasts
were accompanied, and no doubt rendered possible, by the
second great psychical peculiarity of these middle years" her
ecstasies.
2. Her ecstasies and visions.
It is indeed remarkable how these two conditions and
functions, her fasts and her ecstasies of a definite, lengthy
and strength-bringing kind, arise" persist and then fade out
of her life together. And since, in ecstasy, the respiration, the
circulation, and the other physical functions are all slackened
and simplified; the mind is occupied with fewer, simpler,
larger ideas, harmonious amongst themselves; and the
emotions and the will are, for the time, saved the conflict and
confusion, the stress and strain, of the fully waking moments;
and considering that Catherine was peculiarly sensitive to all
this flux and friction, and that she was now often in a more
or less ecstatic trance from two up to eight hours: it follows
that the amount of food required to heal the breach made by
life's wear and tear would, by these ecstasies, be considerably
reduced. And indeed it will have been these contemplative
absorptions which directly mediated for her those accessions
of vigour: and that they did so, in such a soul and for the
uses to which she put this strength, is their fullest justification
as thoroughly wholesome, at least in their ultimate outcome,
in and for this particular life.
And the visions recorded have these two characteristics"
that they all deal with metaphysical realities and relations-
God as source and end of all things, as Light and food of the
soul, and similar conceptions, and never directly with his-
torical persons, scenes, or institutions; and that, whereas the
non-ecstatic picturings of her last period are grandly original,
and demonstrably based upon her own spiritual experience,
these second-period ecstatic visions are readily traceable to
New Testament, Neo-Platonist, and Franciscan precursors"
and have little more originality than this special selection
from amongst other possible literary sources.
3. SPecial character of her sPiritual warfare.
Catherine's ecstasies lead us easily on to the special method
of her spiritual warfare, which can, I think, be summed up in
three maxims: "One thing, and only one at a time"; II Ever
PSYCHO-PHYSICAL AND TEMPERAMENTAL 35
fight self, and you need not trouble about any other foe" ;
and II Fight self by an heroic indirectness and by love, for
love,-through a continuous self-donation to Pure Love
alone. ' ,
Studying here these great convictions simply in their
temperamental occasions, colouring, and limitations, we can
readily discover how the" one thing at a time" maxim
springs from the same disposition as that which found such
refreshment in ecstasy. For here too, partly from a con-
genital incapacity to take things lightly, partly from an
equally characteristic sensitiveness to the conflict and con-
fusion incident to the introduction of any fresh multiplicity
into the consciousness, she requires, even in her non-ecstatic
moments, to have her attention specially concentrated upon
one all-important idea, one point in the field of consciousness.
And, by a faithful wholeness of attention to the successive
spiritually significant circumstances and obligations, interior
impressions and lights, which her praying, thinking, suffering,
actively bring round to her notice, she manages, by such
single steps, gradually to go a very long way, and, by such
severe successiveness, to build up a rich simultaneity. For
each of these faithfully accepted and fully willed and utilized
acts and states, received into her one ever-growing and
deepening personality, leave memories and stimulations
behind them, and mingle, as subconscious elements, with the
conscious acts which follow later on.
4. Two rellzarkable consequences of this kind of warfare.
There were two specially remarkable consequences of this
constant watchful fixation of the one spiritually significant
point in each congeries of circumstances, and of the manner
in which (partly perhaps as the occasion, but probably in
great part as the effect of this attention) one interior condition
of apparent fixity would suddenly shift to another condition
of a different kind but of a similar apparent stability. There
was the manner in which, during these years, she appears to
have escaped the committing of any at all definite offences
against the better and best lights of that particular moment;
and there was the way in which she would realize the
faultiness and subtle self-seeking of anyone state, only at
the moment of its disappearing to make room for another.
I take the accounts of both these remarkable peculiarities
to be substantially accurate, since, if the first condition had
not obtained, we should have found her practising more or
36 THE MYSTIGAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
less frequent Confession, as we find her doing in the first and
third, but not in this period; and if the second condition had
not existed, we should have had, for this period also, some
such vivid account of painful scruples arising from the
impression of actually present unfaithfulnesses, such as has
been preserved for her last years. And indeed, as soon as we
have vividly conceived a state in which a soul (by a wise
utilization of the quite exceptional successiveness and simpli-
fication to which it has been, in great part, driven by its
temperamental requirements, and by a constant heroic watch-
fulness) has managed to exclude from its life, during a long
series of years, all fully deliberate resistances to, or lapses
from, its contemporaneous better insight: one sees at once
that a consciousness of faultiness could come to her only at
those moments when, one state and level giving place to
another, she could, for the moment, see the former habits and
their implicit defects in the clear light of their contrast to her
new, deeper insights and dispositions.
Now it is evident that here again we have in part (in the
curious quasi-fixity of each state, and then the sudden replace-
ment of it by another) something which, taken alone, is simply
psychically peculiar and spiritually indifferent. The per-
sistent sense of gradual or of rapid change in the midst of
a certain continuity and indeed abidingness, characteristic of
the average moments of the average soul, is, taken in itself,
more true to life and to the normal reaction of the human
mind, and not less capable of spiritual utilization, than is
Catherine's peculiarity. Her heroic utilization of her special
psychic life for purposes of self-fighting, and the degree in
which, as we shall find in a later chapter, she succeeded in
moulding this life into a shape representative of certain great
spiritual truths: these things it is which constitute here the
spiritually significant element.
And her second peculiarity of religious practice was her
great simplification and intensification of the spiritual combat.
Simplification: for she does not fight directly either the Devil
or the World; she directly fights the" Flesh" alone, and re-
cognizes but one immediate opponent, her own lower self.
Hence the references to the world are always simply as to an
extension or indefinite repetition of that same self, or of
similar lower selves; and those to the devil are, except where
she declares her own lower self" a very devil," extraordinarily
rare, and, in their authentic forms, never directly and formally
PSYCHO-PHYSICAL AND TEMPERAMENTAL 37
connected with her own spiritual interests and struggles. And
Intensification: for she conceives this lower self, against which
all her fighting is turned, as capable of any enormity, as
actually cloaking itself successively in every kind of disguise,
and as more or less vitiating even the most spiritual-seeming
of her states and acts.
And here again we can, I think, clearly trace the influence
of her special temperament and psycho-physical functioning,
yet in a direction opposite to that in which we would naturally
expect it. For it is not so much that this temperament led
her to exaggerate the badness of her false self, or to elaborate a
myth concerning its (all but completely separate) existence, as
that, owing in large part to that temperament and functioning,
her false self was both unusually distinct from her true self
and particularly clamorous and claimful. It \vould indeed be
well for hagiography if, in all cases, at least an attempt were
made to discover and present the precise and particular good
and bad selves, worked for and fought by the particular saint:
for it is just this double particularization of the common
warfare in every individual soul that gives the poignant interest
and instructiveness, and a bracing sense of reality to these
lonely yet typical, unique yet universal struggles, defeats, and
victories.
And in Catherine's case her special temperament; her par-
ticular attitude during the ten years' laxity, and again during
the last years' times of obscurity and scruple; even some of
her sayings probably still belonging to this middle period;
but above all the precise point and edge of her counter-ideal
and attrait: all indicate clearly enough what was her con-
genital defect. A great self-engrossment of a downrightly
selfish kind; a grouping of all things round such a self-adoring
Ego,. a noiseless but determined elimination from her life and
memory of all that would not or could not, then and there, be
drawn and woven into the organism and functioning of this
immensely self-seeking, infinitely woundable and wounded,
endlessly self-doctoring" I" and " !vIe": a self intensely,
although not sexually, jealous, envious and exacting, in-
capable of easy accommodation, of pleasure in half successes"
of humour and brightness, of joyous" once-born" creature-
liness: all this was certainly to be found, in strong tendency
at least, in the untrained parts and periods of her character
and life.
And then the same peculiarity and sensitiveness of her
38 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
psycho-physical organism which, in her last period, ended by
mirroring her mental spiritual apprehensions and picturings
in her very body, and which, even at this time, has been
traced by us in the curious long fixities and rapid changes of
her fields of consciousness, clearly operates also and already
here, in separating off this false self from the good one and in
heightening the apprehension of that false self to almost a
perception in space, or to an all but physical sensation.
We thus get something of which the interesting cases of
CI doubleness of personality," so much studied of late years,
are, as it were, purely psychical, definitely maladif caricatures;
the great difference consisting in Catherine herself possessing,
at all times, the consciousness and memory of both sides,
of both" selves," and of each as both actual and potential,
within the range of her one great personality. Indeed it is
this very multiplicity thus englobed and utilized by that
higher unity, which gives depth to her sanity and sanctity.!
5. Precise obfect and end of her striving.
And all this is confirmed and completed, as already hinted,
by the precise object of her ideal, the particular means and
special end of the struggle. Here, at the very culmination of
her inner life and aim, we find the deepest traces of her
temperamental requirements; and here, in what she seeks,
there is again an immense concentration and a significant
choice. The distinctions between obligation and supereroga-
tion, between merit and grace, are not utilized but tran-
scended; the conception of God having anger as well as love
arouses as keen a sense of intolerableness as that of God's
envy aroused in Plato, and God appears to her as, in Himself,
continuously loving.
This love of God, again, is seen to be present everywhere,
and, of Itself, everywhere to effect happiness. The disposi-
tions of souls are indeed held to vary within each soul and
between soul and soul, and to determine the differences in
their reception, and consequently in the effect upon them, of
God's one universal love : but the soul's reward and punish-
ment are not something distinct from its state, they are but
that very state prolonged and articulated, since man can
indeed go against his deepest requirements but can never
1 I would draw the reader's attention to the very interesting parallels
to many of the above-mentioned peculiarities furnished both by St.
Teresa in her Life. passim. and by Battista Vernazza in the Autobio-
graphical statements which I have given here in Chapter VIII.
PSYCHO-PHYSICAL AND TEMPERAMENTAL 39
finally suppress them. Heaven, Purgatory, Hell are thus not
places as well as states, nor do they begin only in the beyond:
they are states alone, and begin already here. And Grace
and Love, and Love and Christ, and Christ and Spirit, and
hence Grace and Love and Christ and Spirit are, at bottom,
one, and this One is God. Hence God, loving Himself in and
through us, is alone our full true self. Here, in this constant
stretching out and forward of her whole being into and
towards the ocean of light and love, of God the All in All,
it is not hard to recognize a soul which finds happiness only
when looking out and away from self, and turning, in more
or less ecstatic contemplation and action, towards that Infinite
Country, that great Over-Againstness, God. .
And, in her sensitive shrinking from the idea of an angry
God, we find the instinctive reaction of a nature too naturally
prone itself to angry claimfulness, and which had been too
much driven out of its self-occupation by the painful sense
of interior self-division consequent upon that jealousy, not to
find it intolerable to get out of that little Scylla of her own
hungry self only to fall into a great Charybdis, an apparent
mere enlargement and canonization of that same self, in the
angry God Himself.
And if her second peculiari ty, the concen tra tion of the
fight upon an unusually isolated and intense false self, had
introduced an element of at least relative Rigorism and con-
traction into her spirituality, this third peculiarity brings a
compensating movement of quasi-Pantheism, of immense
expansion. Here the crushed plant expands in boundless air,
Jight and warmth; the parched seaweed floats and unfolds
itself in an immense ocean of pure waters-the soul, as it
were, breathes and bathes in God's peace and love. And it is
evident that the great super-sensible realities and relations
adumbrated by such figures, did not, with her, lead to mere
dry or vague apprehensions. Even in this period, although
here \vith a peaceful, bracing orderliness and harmony, the
reality thus long and closely dwelt on and lived with was, as
it were, physically seen and felt in these its images by a ready
response of her immensely docile psycho-physical organism.
6. Catherine possessed two out of the three conditions
apparently necessary for stig11zatization.
And in this connection we should note how largely reason-
able was the expectation of some of her disciples of finding
some permanent physical effects upon her body; and yet why
4 0 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
she not only had not the stigmata of the Passion, but why she
could not have them. For, of the three apparently necessary
conditions for such stigmatization, she had indeed two-a
long and intense absorption in religious ideas, and a specially
sensitive psycho-physical temperament and organization of the
ecstatic type; but the third condition, the concentration of that
absorption upon Our Lord's Passion and wounds, was wholly
wanting-at least after those four actively penitential and
during those twenty-two ecstatic years. \Ve can, however, say
most truly that although, since at all events I477, her visions
and contemplations were all concerning purely metaphysicaJ,
eternal realities, or certain ceaselessly repeated experiences of
the human soul, or laws and types derived from the greatest
of Christian institutions, her daily solace, the Holy Eucharist:
yet that these verities ended by producing definite images in
her senses, and certain observable though passing impressions
upon her body, so that we can here talk of sensible shadows
or II stigmata II of things purely spiritual and eternal.
And if, in the cases of some ecstatic saints, mental patholo-
gists of a more or less materialistic type have, at times,
shown excessive suspicion as to some of the causes and effects
of these saints' devotion to Our Lord's Humanity under the
imagery and categories of the Canticle of Canticles-all such
suspicions, fair or unfair, have absolutely no foothold in
Catherine's life, since not only is there here no devotion to
God or to Our Lord as Bridegroom of the Bridal soul: there
is no direct contemplative occupation with the historic Christ
and no figuring of Him or of God under human attributes or
relations at alL I think that her temperament and health
had something to do \vith her habitual d\vel1ing upon Thing-
sYlnbols of God: Ocean-Air-Fire-picturings which, con-
ceived with her psycho-physical vividness, must, in their
expanse, have rested and purified her in a way that historical
con tingencies and details would not have done. The doctrinal
and metaphysical side of the matter will be considered later on.
VI. THREE RULES \VHICH SEEM TO GOVERN THE RELA-
TIONS BET\VEEN PSYCHO-PHYSICAL PECULIARITIES
AND SANCTITY IN GENERAL.
If we next inquire how matters stand historically with
regard to the relations between ecstatic states and psycho-
PSYCHO-PHYSICAL AND TEMPERAMENTAL 41
physical peculiarities on the one hand, and sanctity in general
on the other hand, we shall find, I think, that the following
three rules or laws really cover, in a necessarily general, some-
v{hat schematic way, all the chief points, at all certain or
practically important, in this complex and delicate matter.
I. Intense sPiritual energizing is accol1zpanied by auto-
suggestion and mono-ideisnz.
It is clear, for one thing, that as simply all and every
mental, emotional, and volitional energizing is necessarily and
always accompanied by corresponding nerve-states, and that
if we had not some neural sensitiveness and neural adapta-
bility, we could not-whilst living our earthly life-think,
or feel, or will in regard to anything whatsoever: a certain
special degree of at least potential psycho-physical sensi-
tiveness and adaptability must be taken to be, not the
productive cause, but a necessary condition for the exercise,
of any considerable range and depth of mind and will, and
hence of sanctity in general; and that the actual aiming at,
and gradual achievement of, sanctity in these, thus merely
possible cases, spiritualizes and further defines this sensitive-
ness, as the instrument, material, and expression of the soul's
work. 1 And this work of the heroic soul will necessarily
consist, in great part, in attending to, calling up, and, as far as
may be, both fixing and ever renovating certain few great
dominant ideas, and in attempting by every means to saturate
the imagination with images and figures, historical and sym-
bolic, as so many incarnations of these great verities.
We get thus what, taken simply phenomenally and without
as yet any inquiry as to an ultimate reality pressing in upon
the soul,-a divine stimulation underlying all its sincere and
fruitful action,-is a spiritual mono-ideism and auto-sug-
gestion, of a more or less general kind. But, at this stage,
these activities and their psycho-physical concomitants and
results will, though different in kind, be no more abnormal
than is the mono-ideism and auto-suggestion of the mathema-
tician, the tactician, and the constructive statesman. Newton,
Napoleon, and Richelieu: they were all dominated by some
great central idea, and they all for long years dwelt upon it
and worked for it within themselves, till it became alive and
1 The omnipresence of neural conditions and consequences for all and
every mental and volitional activity has been admirably brought out by
Prof. W. James. in his Varieties 01 Religious Experience. 1902. Vol. I.
pp. 1- 2 5.
.
42 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
aflame in their imaginations and their outward-moving wills,
before, yet as the means of, its taking external and visible
shape. And, in all the cases that we can test in detail, the
psycho-physical accompaniments of all this profound mental-
volitional energy were most marked. In the cases of Newton
and Napoleon, for instance, a classification of their energizings
solely according to their neural accompaniments would force
us to class these great discoverers and organizers amongst
psycho-physical eccentrics. Yet the truth and value of their
work and character has, of course, to be measured, not by
this its neural fringe and cost, but by its central spiritual truth
and fruitfulness.
2. Such 1nechanis11ls specially nlarked in PhilosoPhers,
Musicians, Poets, and Mystical Religionists.
The mystical and contemplative element in the religious
life, and the group of saints amongst whom this element is
predominant, no doubt give us a still larger amount of what,
again taking the matter phenomenally and not ultimately, is
once more mono-ideism and auto-suggestion, and entails a
correspondingly larger amount of psycho-physical impression-
ableness and reaction utilized by the mind. But here also,
from the simplest forms of the " prayer of quiet " to absorp-
tions of an approximately ecstatic type, we have something
which, though different in kind and value, is yet no more
abnormal than are the highest flights and absorptions of the
Philosopher, the Musician, and the Poet. And yet, in such
cases as Kant and Beethoven, a classifier of humanity accord-
ing to its psycho-physical phenomena alone would put these
great discoverers and creators, without hesitation, amongst
hopeless and useless hypochondriacs. Yet here again the
truth of their ideas and the work of their lives have to be
measured by quite other things than by this their neural
concomitance and cost.
3. Ecstatics possess a peculiar psycho-Physical organization.
The downright ecstatics and hearers of voices and seers of
visions have all, wherever we are able to trace their tempera-
mental and neural constitution and history, possessed and
developed a definitely peculiar psycho-physical organization.
We have traced it in Catherine and indicated it in St. Teresa.
We find it again in S t. Maria IVlagdalena dei Pazzi and in
St. Marguerite Marie Alacocque, in modern times, and in St.
Catherine of Siena and St. Francis of Assisi in mediaeval
times. For early Christian thnes we are too ignorant as
PSYCHO-PHYSICAL AND TEMPERAMENTAL 43
regards the psycho-physical organization of St. Ignatius of
Antioch, Hermas, and St. Cyprian, to be able to establish a
connection between their temperamental endowments and
their hearing of voices and seeing of visions-in the last two
cases we get much that looks like more or less of a mere
conventional literary device. 1
We are, however, in a fair position for judging, in the typical
and thoroughly original case of St. Paul. In 2 Cor. xiii, 7, 8,
after speaking of the abundant revelations accorded to him,
he adds that" lest I be lifted up, a thorn" (literally, a stake)
" in the flesh was given to me, an Angel of Sa tan to buffet me."
And though" I thrice besought the Lord that it might depart
from me, the Lord answered me, , My grace is sufficient for
thee; for grace is perfected in infirmity.'" And he was con-
sequently determined" rather" to" glory in his infirmities, so
that the power of Christ may dwell within" him. And in
Gal. iv, I4, I5, written about the same time, he reminds his
readers how he had " preached to them through the infirmity
of the flesh," commending them because they" did not despise
nor loathe their temptation in his flesh" (this is no doubt the
correct reading), " but had received him as an Angel of God,
as Christ Jesus."
Now the most ancient interpretation of this" thorn" or
II stake" is some kind of bodily complaint,-violent headache
or earache is mentioned by Tertullian de Pudicitia, 13, and
by St. Jerome, Comm. in Gal.loc. cit. Indeed St. Paul's own
description of his "bodily presence" as "weak," and his
" spoken word" as II contemptible" (2 Cor. x, 10), points this
way. It seems plain that it cannot have been carnal tempta-
tions (only in the sixth century did this interpretation become
firmly established), for he could not have gloried in these, nor
could they, hidden as they would be within his heart, have
exposed him to the contempt of others. Indeed he expressly
excludes such troubles from his life, where, in advising those
who were thus oppressed to marry, he gives the preference to
the single life, and declares, " I would that all men were even
as I myself" (I Cor. vii, 7).
The attacks of this trouble were evidently acutely painful:
note the metaphor of a stake driven into the live flesh and
the Angel of Satan who buffeted him. (And compare St.
1 H. Weinel's Die Wirkungen des Geistes tmd der Geister im nacha-
postolischen Zeitalter. bis auf Irenä'lts. 1899. contains an admirably careful
investigation of these things.
44 THE l\lYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
Teresa's account: II An Angel of God appeared to me to be
thrusting at times a long spear into my heart and to pierce
my very entrails"; cc the pain was so great that it made me
moan "; II it really seems to the soul as if an arrow were thrust
through the heart or through itself; the suffering is not one
of sense, neither is the wound physical"; and how, on another
occasion, she heard Our Lord answer her: U Serve thou Me,
and meddle not with this.") 1
These attacks would come suddenly, even in the course of
his public ministry, rendering him, in so far, an object of
derision and of loathing. (Compare here St. Teresa's declara-
tion: U During the rapture, the body is very often perfectly
powerless; it continues in the position it was in when the
rapture came upon it: if sitting, sitting; if the hands were
open, or if they were shut, they will remain open or shut" ;
U if the body" was U standing or kneeling, it remains so.") 2
Yet these attacks were evidently somehow connected, both
in fact and in his consciousness, with his Visions; and they were
recurrent. The vision of the Third Heaven and his apparently
first attack seem to have been practically coincident,-about
A.D. 44. We find a second attack hanging about him for
some time, on his first preaching in Galatia, about A.D. 51
or 52 (see I Thess. ii, 18; I Cor. ii, 3). And a third attack
appears to have come in A.D. 57 or 58, when the Second
Epistle to the Corinthians and that to the Galatians were
written; note the words (2 Cor. i, 9), U Yea" (in addition to
his share in the public persecution), cc we ourselves have
had the answer of death within ourselves, that we should
not trust in ourselves, but in God which raiseth the dead."
(And compare here St. Teresa: in July 1547 U for about four
days I remained insensible. They must have regarded me
as dead more than once. For a day and a half the grave was
open in my monastery, waiting for my body. But it pleased
Our Lord I should come to myself.") 3 Dr. Lightfoot gives as
a parallel the epileptiform seizures of l{ing Alfred, which,
sudden, acutely painful, at times death-like, and protracted,
tended to render the royal power despicable in the eyes of
the world. 4 Yet, except for the difference of sex and of
1 Lite, v.'Yitten by herself. ed. cit. pp. 235, 423; 136.
2 Ibid. pp. 149, 4 20 . 3 Ibid. pp. xxii, 28.
4 It is to Dr. Lightfoot's fine Excursus in St. Paul's EPistle to the
Galatians, ed. 1881. pp. 186-191. that I owe all the Pauline texts and
most of the considerations reproduced above.
PSYCHO-PHYSICAL AND TEMPERAMENTAL 45
relative privacy, St. Teresa's states, which I have given here,
are more closely similar, in so much as they are intimately
connected with religious visions and voices.
And, amongst Old Testament figures, we can find a similar
connection, on a still larger scale, in the case of Ezekiel, the
most definitely ecstatic, though (upon the \vhole) the least
original, of the literary Prophets. For, as to the visionary
element, we have his own records of three visions of the glory
of Jahve; of five other ecstasies, three of which are accom-
panied by remarkable telepathic, second-sight activities; and
of twelve symbolic (better: representative) prophetic actions,
which are now all rightly coming to be considered as having
been externally carried out by him. l And we get psycho-
physical states, as marked as in any other ecstatic saint.
For we hear how Jahve on one occasion says to him: "But
thou, son of man, lay thyself on thy left side" (i. e. according
to Jewish orientation, towards the North) " and I shall lay the
guilt of the house of Israel" (the Northern Kingdom) " upon
thee; the number of days that thou shalt lie upon it, shalt
thou bear their guilt. But I appoint unto thee the years of
their guilt, as a (corresponding) number of days, (namely) one
hundred and fifty days. . . . And, when thou hast done with
them, thou shalt lay thyself on thy right side" (i. e. towards the
South), " and thou shalt bear the guilt of the house of Judah"
(the Southern Kingdom); "one day for each year shall I
appoint unto thee. And behold I shall lay cords upon thee,
that thou shalt be unable to turn from one side to the other,
till thou hast ended the days of thy boundness" (iv, 4-8).
Krâtzschmar, no doubt rightly, finds here a case of hemi-
plegia and anaesthesia, functional cataleptic paralysis lasting
during five months on the left side, and then shifting for
about six weeks to the right side. And the alalia (speech-
lessness), which no doubt accompanied this state, is referred to
on three other occasions: xxiv, 27; xxix, 31; xxxiii, 22.
And note how J ahve's address to Ezekiel, "son of man,"
which occurs in this book over ninety times, and but once in
the whole of the rest of the Old Testament (Dan. viii,
1 Visions of Jahve's glory: i, 1-28; iii. 22-27; xl. I; xliv. 4. The five
other Ecstasies and Visions: viii, I foIl.; xi, 1 foIl.; xxiv. I foIl.; xxxiii.
22; xxxvii, I foIl. Second Sight: viii. 16; xi, 13; xxiv, I. Representa-
tive Actions: iv. 1-3. 7; iv. 4-6. 8; iv. 10; ix, 11-15; xii. 1-16; xii.
17-20; xxi. I I. 12; xxi. 23-32; xxiv. 1-14; xxiv, 15-27; xxxiii. 22;
xxxvii, 15-28.
46 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
I7), evidently stands here for the sense of his creaturely
nothingness, so characteristic of the true ecstatic. 1
Now, at this last stage, the analogy of the other non-
religious activities of the healthy mind and of their psycho-
physical conditions and effects forsakes us; but not the
principle which has guided us all along. For here, as from
the very first, some such conditions and effects are inevitable;
and the simple fact of this occurrence, apart from the question
of their particular character, is something thoroughly norma1.
And here again, and more than ever, the emphasis and de-
cisions have to lie with, and to depend upon, the mental and
volitional work and the spiritual truth and reality achieved
in and for the recipient, and, through hinl, in and for others.
Even at the earlier stages, to cling to the form, as distinct
from the content and end, of these things was to be thoroughly
unfair to this their content and end, within the spacious
economy of the spirit's life; at this stage such clinging
becomes destructive of all true religion. For if the mere
psycho-physical forms and phenomena of ecstasy, of vision, of
hearing of voices is, in proportion to their psycho-physical
intensity and seeming automatism and quasi-physical object-
ivity, to be taken as necessarily a means and mark of sanctity
or of insight, or, at least, as something presumably sent direct
by God or else as diabolical, something necessarily super-
or preter-natural: then the lunatic asylums contain more
miracles, saints, and sages, or their direct, strangely similar
antipodes, than all the most fervent or perverted churches,
monasteries, and families upon God's earth. For in asylums
we find ecstasies, visions, voices, all more, not less marked, all
more, not less irresistibly objective-seeing to the recipient,
than anything to be found outside.
Yet apply impartially to both sets the test, not of form,
but of content, of spiritual fruitfulness and of many-sided
applicability-and this surface-similarity yields at once to
a fundamental difference. Indeed all the great mystics, and
this in precise proportion to their greatness, have ever taught
1 The above translation and interpretation is based upon Krätzschmar.s
admirably psychological commentary, Das Buch Ezechiel, Göttingen, 1900.
pp. v, vi; 45, 49. But I think he is wrong in taking that six months'
abnormal condition to have given rise, in Ezekiel's mind, to a belief in a
previous divine order and to an interpretation of this order. All the
strictly analogical cases of religious ecstasy, not hysteria, point to a strong
mental impression. such as that order and belief having preceded and
occasioned the peculiar psycho-physical state.
PSYCHO-PHYSICAL AND TEMPERAMENTAL 47
that, the mystical capacities and habits being but means and
not ends, only such ecstasies are valuable as leave the soul,
and the very body as its instrument, strengthened and
improved; and that visions and voices are to be accepted
by the mind only in proportion as they convey some spiritual
truth of importance to it or to others, and as they actually
help it to become more humble, true, and loving.
And there can be no doubt that these things worked thus
with such great ecstatic mystics as Ezekiel, the man of the
great prophetic schemes and the permanently fruitful picturing
of the Good Shepherd; as St. Paul, the greatest missionary
and organizer ever given to the Christian Church; as St.
Francis of Assisi, the salt and leaven and light of the Church
and of society, in his day and more or less ever since; as St.
Catherine of Siena, the free-spoken, docile reinspirer of the
Papacy; as Jeanne d'Arc, the maiden deliverer of a Nation;
as St. Teresa, reformer of a great Order. All these, and
countless others, would, quite evidently, have achieved less,
not more, of interior light and of far-reaching helpfulness of a
kind readily recognized by all specifically religious souls, had
they been without the rest, the bracing, the experience
furnished to them by their ecstasies and allied states and
apprehensions.
VII. PERENNIAL FRESHNESS OF THE GREAT MYSTICS'
MAIN SPIRITUAL TEST, IN CONTRADISTINCTION TO
THEIR SECONDARY, PSYCHOLOGICAL CONTENTION.
Two SPECIAL DIFFICULTIES.
I. A false and a true test of mystical experience.
Now it is deeply interesting to note how entirely un-
weakened, indeed how impressively strengthened, by the
intervening severe test of whole centuries of further experi-
ence and of thought, has remained the main and direct, the
spiritual test of the great l\lystics, in contradistinction to their
secondary psychological contention with respect to such ex-
periences. The secondary, psychological contention is well
reproduced by St. Teresa where she says: "When I speak,
I go on with my understanding arranging what I am saying;
but, if I am spoken to by others, I do nothing else but listen
without any labour." In the former case, " the soul," if it be
in good faith, " cannot possibly fail to see clearly that itself
48 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
arranges the words and utter..., them to itself. How then can the
understanding have time enough to arrange these locutions?
They require time." 1 Now this particular argument for their
supernaturalness derived frolll the psychological form-from
the suddenness, clearness, and apparent automatism of these
locutions-has ceased to carry weight, owing to our present,
curiously recent, knowledge concerning the subconscious
region of the mind, and the occasionally sudden irruption of
that region's contents into the field of that same mind's
ordinary, full consciousness. In the Ven. Battista Vernazza's
case we ha ve a particularly clear instance of such a long
accumulation,-by means of much, in great part full, atten-
tion to certain spiritual ideas, words, and images,-in the
subconscious regions of a particularly strong and deeply
sincere and saintly mind; and the sudden irruption from
those regions of certain clear and apparently quite spontane-
ous words and images into the field of her mind's full
consciousness. 2
But the reference to the great Mystics' chief and direct
test, upon which they dwell with an assurance and self-con-
sistency far surpassing that which accompanies their psycho-
logical argument,-the spiritual content and effects of such
experiences,-this, retains all its cogency. St. Teresa tells us :
"When Our Lord speaks, it is both word and work: His
words are deeds." "I found myself, through these words
alone, tranquil and strong, courageous and confident, at rest
and enlightened: I felt I could maintain against all the world
that my prayer was the work of God." "I could not believe
that Satan, if he wished to deceive me, could have recourse to
means so adverse to his purpose as this, of rooting out my
faults, and Ünplanting virtues and spiritual strength: for I saw
clearly that I had become another person, by means of these
visions." "So efficacious was the vision, and such was the
nature of the words spoken to me, that I could not possibly
doubt that they came from Him." U I was in a trance; and
the effects of it were such, that I could have no doubt it
came from God." On another occasion she writes less posi-
tively even of the great test: "She never undertook any-
thing merely because it came to her in prayer. For all
that her Confessors told her that these things came from
1 Gp. cit. pp. IgOC; Ig2C. Ig3 a .
2 See Prof. W. James's admirable account of these irruptions in his
Varieties of Religious Experience. 1902. pp. 231-237.
PSYCHO-PHYSICAL AND TEMPERAMENTAL 49
God, she never so thoroughly believed them that she could
swear to it herself, though it did seem to her that they were
spiritually safe, because of the effects thereof." 1 This doctrine
is still the last word of wisdom in these matters.
2. First special difficulty in testing ecstasies.
Yet it is only at this last stage that two special difficulties
occur, the one philosophical, the other moral. The philoso-
phical difficulty is as follows. As long as the earlier stages
are in progress, it is not difficult to understand that the soul
may be gradually building up for herself a world of spiritual
apprehensions, and a corresponding spiritual and moral char-
acter, by a process which, looked at merely phenomenally
and separately, appears as a simple case of mono-ideism and
auto-suggestion, but which can and should be conceived,
when studied in its ultimate cause and end, as due to the
pressure and influence of God's spirit working in and
through the spirit of man,-the Creator causing His own
little human creature freely to create for itself some copy
of and approach to its own eternally subsisting, substantial
Cause and Crown. There the operation of such an under-
lying Supreme Cause, and a consequent relation between
the world thus conceived and built up by the human soul
and the real world of the Divine Spirit, appears possible,
because the things which the soul is thus made to suggest
to itself are ideas, and because even these ideas are clearly
recognized by the soul as only instruments and approaches
to the realities for which they stand. But here, in
this last stage, we get the suggestion, not of ideas, but of
psycho-physical impressions, and these impressions are, ap-
parently, not taken as but distantly illustrative, but as some-
how one with the spiritual realities for which they stand. Is
not, e. g., Catherine's joy at this stage centred precisely in the
downright feeling, smelling, seeing, of ocean waters, penetrat-
ing odours, all-enveloping light; and in the identification of
those waters, odours, lights, with God Himself, so that God
becomes at last an object of direct, passive, sensible per-
ception ? Have we not then here a t last reached pure
delusion?
Not so, in proportion as the mystic is great and spiritual,
and as he here still clings to the principles common to aU
true religion. For, in proportion as he is and does this, will
he find and regard the mind as deeper and more operative
1 Life. written by Herself. pp. I90b; I96b; 224c; 295c; 4 I 3 b .
VOL. II. E
50 THE MYSTIGAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
than sense, and God's Spirit as penetrating and transcending
both the one and the other. And hence he will (at least
implicitly) regard those psycho-physical impressions as but
sense-like and really mental; and he will consider this
mental impression and projection as indeed produced by the
presence and action of the Spirit within his mind or of the
pressure of spiritual realities upon it, but willhold that this whole
mental process, with these its spatial- and temporal-seeming
embodiments, these sights and sounds, has only a relation
and analogical likeness to, and is not and cannot be identical
with, those realities of an intrinsically super-spatial, super-
temporal order.-And thus here as everywhere, although here
necessarily more than ever, we find again the conception of
the Transcendent yet also Immanent Spirit, effecting in the
human spirit the ever-increasing apprehension of Himself,
accompanied in this spirit by an ever-keener sense of His
incomprehensibility for all but Himself. And here again the
truth, and more especially the divine origin of these appre-
hensions, is tested and guaranteed on and on by the conse-
quent deepening of that spiritual and ethical fruitfulness and
death to self, which are the common aspirations of every
deepest moment and every sincerest movement within the
universal heart of man.
Thus, as regards the mentality of these experiences, Cathe-
rine constantly speaks of seeing" as though with the eyes of
the body." And St. Teresa tells us of her visions with" the
eyes of the soul "; of how at first she" did not know that it
was possible to see anything otherwise than with the eyes of
the body"; of how, in reality" she never," in her true visions
and locutions, " saw anything with her bodily eyes, nor heard
anything with her bodily ears"; and of how indeed she later
on, on one occasion, " saw nothing with the eyes of the body,
nothing with the eyes of the soul," -she" simply felt Christ
close by her,"-evidently again with the soul. Thus, too,
Gatherine tells us, that " as the intellect exceeds language,
so does love exceed intellection"; and how vividly she feels
that " all that can be said of God," compared to the great
Reality, " is but tiny crumbs from the great Master's table." 1
And, as to the inadequacy of these impressions, the class-
ical authority on such things, St. John of the Cross, declares:
U He that will rely on the letter of the divine locutions or on
the intelligible form of the vision, will of necessity fall into
I Vita. passim; Life. ed. cit. pp. 40. 4 I; 408; 206. Vita. pp. 87c. 77b.
PSYCHO-PHYSICAL AND TEMPERAMENTAL 5I
delusion; for he does not yield to the Spirit in detachment
from sense." U He who shall give attention to these motes of
the Spirit alone will, in the end, have no spirituality at all."
U All visions, revelations, and heavenly feelings, and whatever
is greater than these, are not worth the least act of humility,
bearing the fruits of that charity which neither values nor
seeks itself, which thinketh well not of self but of all others."
Indeed (( virtue does not consist in these apprehensions. Let
men then cease to regard, and labour to forget them, that
they may be free." For (( spiritual supernatural knowledge
is of two kinds, one distinct and special," which comprises
U visions, revelations, locutions, and spiritual impressions" ;
(( the other confused, obscure, and general," which U has but one
form, that of contemplation which is the work of faith. The
soul is to be led into this, by directing it thereto through all the
rest, beginning with the first, and detaching it from them."
Hence (( many souls, to whom visions have never come, are
incomparably more advanced in the way of perfection than
others to whom many have been given "; and (( they who are
already perfect, receive these visitations of the Spirit of God
in peace; ecstasies cease, for they were only graces to prepare
them for this greater grace." Hence, too, (( one desire only
doth God allow and suffer in His Presence: that of perfectly
observing His law and of carrying the Cross of Christ. In the
Ark of the Covenant there was but the Book of the Law, the
Rod of Aaron, and the Pot of l\Ianna. Even so that soul,
which has no other aim than the perfect observance of the
Law of God and the carrying of the Cross of Christ, will be a
true Ark containing the true Manna, which is God." And
this perfected soul's intellectual apprehensions will, in their
very mixture of light and conscious obscurity, more and more
approach and forestall the eternal condition of the beatified
soul. U One of the greatest favours, bestowed transiently on
the soul in this Hfe, is to enable it to see so distinctly and to feel
so profoundly, that it cannot comprehend Him at all. These
souls are herein, in some degree, Jike the Saints in Heaven,
where they who know Him most perfectly perceive most
clearly that He is infinitely incomprehensible; for those who
have the less clear vision do not perceive so distinctly as the
others how greatly He transcends their vision." 1
1 Ascent of Mount Carmel. ed. cit. pp. 159. 163; 264. 265. 102. 195:
Spiritual Canticle. ed. cit. p. 238; Ascent. pp. 26. 27; Canticle. pp. 206.
20 7.
52 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
3. Second special difficulty in testing ecstasies.
The second special difficulty is this. Have not at least
some of the saints of this definitely ecstatic type shown more
psycho-physical abnormality than spiritually fruitful origina-
tion or utilization of such things, so that their whole life
seems penetrated by a fantastic spirit? And have not many
others, who, at their best, may not have been amenable to
this charge, ended with shattered nerve- and will-power, with
an organism apparently incapable of any further growth or
use, even if we restrict our survey exclusively to strength-
bringing ecstasy and to a contemplative prayer of some
traceable significance?
(I) As a good instance of the apparent predominance of
psycho-physical and even spiritual strangeness, we can take the
Venerable Sister Lukardis, Cistercian Nun of Ober-Weimar,
born probably in 1276. Her life is published from a unique
Latin MS. by the Bollandists (A nalecta, Va!. XVIII, pp. 305-
367, Bruxelles, 1899), and presents us withamediaevallynaïve
and strangely unanalytic, yet extraordinaril)l vivid picture of
things actually seen by the writer. " Although," say the most
competent editors, "we know not the name nor profession of the
Author, whether he belonged to the Friars or to the Monks,1
it is certain that he was a contemporary of Lukardis, that he
knew her intimately, and that he learnt many details from her
fellow-nuns. And though we shall be slow to agree with
him when he ascribes all the strange things which she ex-
perienced in her soul and body to divine influence, yet we
should beware of considering him to be in bad faith. For,
though he erred perchance in ascribing to a divine operation
things which are simply the work of nature, such a vice is
common amongst those who transmit such things." 2 I take
the chief points in the order of their narration by the Vita.
" Soon after Lukardis had, at twelve years of age, taken
the Cistercian habit, her mother died," over twelve English
miles away, at Edurt, yet Lukardis " saw the scene" in such
detail (( in the spirit," that, when her sister came to tell her,
she, Lukardis, " anticipated her with an account of the day,
the place anp hour of the death, of the clothes then being
worn by their mother, of the precise position of the bed and
of the hospital, and of the persons present at the time."
1 Two Confessors of hers are mentioned by her, Vita, p. 352: Fathers
Henry of Mühlhausen, and Eberhard of the Friars Preachers.
2 Analecta. loco cit. p. 310.
PSYCHO-PHYSICAL AND TEMPERAMENTAL 53
She soon suffered from U stone" in the bladder; II quartan,
tertian, and continuous fevers," and from fainting fits; also
from contraction of the muscles (nervi) of the hands, so that
the latter were all but useless and could not even hold the
staff on which she had to lean in walking, till they had been
"tightly wrapped round in certain clothes." Yet (( she would,
at times, strike her hands so vehemently against each other,
that they resounded as though they had been wooden boards."
" When lying in bed she would sometimes, as it were, plant
her feet beneath her, hang her head down" backwards, "and
raise her abdomen and chest, making thus, as it were, a highly
curved arch of her person." Indeed sometimes " she would
for a long while stand upon her head and shoulders, with her
feet up in air, but with her garments adhering to her limbs,
as though they had been sewn on to them." "Often, too, by
day or night, she was wont to run with a most impetuous
course ;-she understood that, by this her course, she was
compensating Christ for His earthly course of thirty-three
years." 1
" On one occasion she had a vision of Christ, in which He
said to her: 'Join thy hands to My hands, and thy feet to l\Iy
feet, and thy breast to l\Iy breast, and thus shall I be aided
by thee to suffer less.' And instantly she felt a most keen
pain of wounds," in all three regions, " although wounds did
not as yet appear to sight." But" as she bore the memory of
the hammering of the nails in to Christ upon the Cross within
her heart, so did she exercise herself in outward deed. For
she was frequently wont, with the middle finger of one hand,
impetuously to wound the other in the place appropriate to
the stigmata; then to withdraw her finger to the distance of
a cubit, and straightway again impetuously to wound herself.
Those middle fingers felt hard like metal. And about the
sixth and ninth hour she would impetuously \vound herself
with her finger in the breast, at the appropriate place for the
wound." -After about two years" Christ appeared to her in
the night of Blessed Gregory, Pope" (St. Gregory VII, l\iay
26 ?), (( pressed her right hand firmly in His, and declared,
, I desire thee to suffer with
Ie.' On her consenting, a wound
instantly appeared in her right hand; about ten days later a
wound in the left hand; and thus successively the five wounds
were found in her body." "The wounds of the scourging
1 Analecta. pp. 3 11 -3 1 3.
54 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
were also found upon her, of a finger's length, and having a
certain hard skin around them." 1
U At whiles she would lie like one dead throughout the day;
yet her countenance was very attractive, owing to a wondrous
flushed look. And even if a needle was pressed in to her
flesh, she felt no pain."-u On one occasion she was carried
upon her couch by two sisters into the Lady Chapel, to the
very spot where her body now reposes. After having been
left there alone for about an hour, the Blessed Virgin appeared
to her, with her beloved Infant, Jesus, in her arms, and suckling
Him. And Lukardis, contrary to the law of her strength"-
she had, by now, been long confined to a reclining posture-
It arose from her couch and began to stand upright. And at
this juncture one of the Sisters opened the Chapel door a
little, and, on looking in, marvelled at Lukardis being able
to stand, but withdrew and forbade the other Sisters from
approaching thither, since she feared that, if they saw her
standing thus, they might declare her to be quite able, if she
but chose, to arise and stand at any time. Upon the Blessed
Virgin twice insisting upon being asked for some special
favour, and Lukardis declaring, 'I desire that thou slake
'my thirst with that same milk with which I now see thee
suckling thy beloved Son,' the Blessed Virgin came up to
her, and gave her to drink of her milk." And when later on
Lukardis was fetched by the Sisters, she was" found reclining
on her couch. And for three days and nights she took neither
food nor drink, and could not see the light of day. And as a
precaution, since her death was feared, Extreme Unction was
administered to her. And, later on, the Sister who had seen
her standing in the Chapel, gradually drew the whole story
from her." 2
" After she had lain, very weak, and, as it were, in a state
of contracture, for eleven years, it happened that, about the
ninth hour of one Good Friday, the natural bodily heat and
colour forsook her; she seemed nowise to breathe; her wounds
bled more than usual; she appeared to be dead. And her
fellow-Sisters wept greatly. Yet about Vesper-time she opened
her eyes and began to move; and her companions were
wondrously consoled. And then in the Easter night, about
the hour of Christ's Resurrection, as, with the other sick Sisters,
she lay in her bed placed so as to be able to hear the Divine
I Analeeta. pp. 314. 315.
I Vita. loco cit. pp. 317. 3 1 9.
PSYCHO-PHYSICAL AND TE1iPERAMENTAL 55
Office, she felt all her limbs to be as it were suffused with a
most refreshing dew. And straightway she saw stretched
down to her from Heaven a hand, as it were of the Blessed
Virgin, which stroked her wounds and all the painful places,
the ligaments and joints of her members, gently and com-
passionately. After which she straightway felt how that all
her members, which before had for so long been severely con-
tracted, and how the knots, formed by the ligaments (nervi),
were being efficaciously resolved and equally distended, so
tha t she considered herself freed from her hard bondage. She
arose unaided from her couch, proceeded to the near-by
entrance to the Choir, and prostrated herself there, in fervent
orison, with her arms outstretched in cross-form, for a very
long hour. And then, commanded by the Abbess to rise,
she readily arose without help, stood with pleasure, and walked
whithersoever she would." "A t all times she ever suffered
more from the cold than any of her companions." 1
"As, during those eleven years that she lay like one
paralyzed, she was wont, on every Friday, to lie with her
arms expanded as though on the Cross, and her feet one on
the top of the other; so, after the Lord had so wonderfully
raised her on that Paschal day, she, on every Friday and
every Lenten day, would stand erect with her arms out-
stretched, crosswise, and, without any support, on one foot
only, with the other foot planted upon its fellow, from the
hour of noon to that of Vespers." _It Whilst she was still un-
cured, and required some delicate refection which the Convent
could not afford, there came to her," one day, "the most
loving Infant, bearing in His Hand the leg of a chicken, newly
roasted, and begging her to eat it for His sake." She did so,
and was wonderfully strengthened. Apparently late on in
her life (( they procured, with much labour and diligence, all
kinds of drinkables from different and even from distant places
for her. But she, having tasted anyone of them, would
straightway shake her head, close her lips, and then declare
that she could not drink it up." "However delicious in itself,
it seemed to be so much gall and wormwood when applied to
her mouth." 2
And if we look, not at se
mingly childish fantasticalness in
certain mystical lives, but at the later state of shattered health
and apparently weakened nerve- and will-power which appears
1 Vita. pp. 319. 3 20 ,
Ibid., loç, cit. pp. 3 2 7. 334. 35 2 .
56 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
so frequently to be the price paid for the definitely ecstatic
type of religion, even where it has been spiritually fruitful,
our anxiety is readily renewed. Look at the nine, possibly
thirteen, last years of Catherine's, or at the last period of St.
Margaret 1\Iary's life; note the similar cases of S5. Maria
Magdalena de Pazzi and Juliana Falconieri. And we have
a figure of all but pure suffering and passivity in St.
Lidwina of Schiedam (1380-1433), over which 1\1:. Huysmans
has managed to be so thoroughly morbid.
(2) And if such lives strike us as too exceptional to be
taken, with whatever deductions, as a case in point, we can find
a thoroughly fair instance in the life of Father Isaac Hecker.
Here we have a man of extraordinary breadth, solidity, and
activity of mind and character, and whose mysticism is of the
most sober and harmonious kind. Yet his close companion
and most faithful chronicler, Father Walter Elliott, tells us :
(( From severe colds, acute headaches, and weakness of the
digestive organs, Father Hecker was at all times a frequent
sufferer. But, towards the end of the year 1871, his headaches
became much more painful, his appetite forsook him, and
sleeplessness and excitability of the nervous system were
added to his other ailments. Remedies of every kind were
tried, but without permanent relief. By the summer of 1872
he was wholly incapacitated." U The physical sufferings of
those last sixteen" (out of the sixty-nine) C( years of his life
were never such as to impair his mental soundness . . .
though his organs of speech were sometimes too slow for his
thoughts." His digestion and nervous system had been im-
paired by excessive abstinence in early manhood, and by
excessive work in later life, C( till at last the body struck work
al together. During the sixteen years of his illness every
symptom of bodily illness was aggravated by the least attention
to community affairs or business matters, and also by interior
trials," although he still managed, by heroic efforts, at times
directly to serve his congregation and to write some remark-
able papers. Yet this state continued, practically unbroken,
up to the end, on December 22, 1888. 1 And although the
various proximate causes, indicated by Father Elliott, had no
doubt been operative here, there can, in view of the numerous
similar cases, be no question that the most fundamental of
the reasons of this general condition of health was his strongly
1 The Life of Father Hecker. by the Rev. Walter Elliott. New York,
1 8 94, pp. 37 1 . 37 2 . 4 18 .
PSYCHO-PHYSICAL AND TEMPERAMENTAL 57
mystical type and habit of mind and his corresponding
psycho-physical organization.
(3) In view of those fantasticalnesses and of these ex-
haustions, we cannot but ask whether these things are not
a terrible price to pay for such states? whether such states
should not be disallowed by all solid morality, and should
not prompt men of sense to try and stamp them out? And,
above all, we seem placed once more, with added anxiety,
before the question whether what is liable to end in such
sad general incapacitation was not, from the first, directly
productive of, and indeed simply produced by, some
merely subjective, simply psycho-physical abnormality and
morbidness?
(4) Three points here call for consideration. Let us, for
one thing, never forget that physical health is not the true
end of human life, but only one of its most important means
and conditions. The ideal man is not, primarily and directly,
a physical machine, perfect as such in its development and
function, to which would be tacked on, as a sort of concomitant
or means, the mental, moral, and spiritual life and character.
But the ideal man is precisely this latter life and character,
with the psycho-physical organism sustained and developed
in such, and only such, a degree, direction, and combination,
as may make it the best possible substratum, stimulus, in-
strument, material, and expression for and of that spiritual
personality. 1 Hence, the true question here is not whether
such a type of life as we are considering exacts a serious
physical tribute or not, but whether the specifically human
effects and fruits of that life are worth that cost.
No one denies that mining, or warfare, or hospital work,
both spiritual and medical, involve grave risks to life, nor that
the preparation of many chemicals is directly and inevitably
injurious to health. Yet no one thinks of abolishing such
occupations or of blaming those who follow them, and
rightly so; for instant death may and should be risked,
the slow but certain undermining of the physical health
may be laudably embarked on, if only the mind and character
are not damaged, and if the end to be attained is found
1 Robert Browning. in Rabbi Ben Ezra, viii; :Matthew Arnold, in
Culture and Anarchy. 21; Prof. James Seth, in A Study of Ethical
Principles, 1894, pp. 260-262; and Prof. Percy Gardner, in Oxford at the
Cross Roads, 1903, pp. 12-14, have all admirably insisted upon this most
important point.
58 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
to be necessary or seriously helpful, and unattainable by
other means.
The simple fact, then, of frequent and subsequent, or even
of universal and concomitant ill-health in such mystical cases,
or even the proof of this ill-health being a direct consequence
or necessary condition of that mystical life, can but push back
the debate, and simply raises the question as to the serious
value of that habit and activity. Only a decision adverse to
that serious value would constitute those facts into a con-
demnation of that activity itself.
And, next, it must be plain to anyone endowed with an
appreciable dose of the mystical sense, and with a sufficiently
large knowledge of human nature and of religious apprehension
in the past and present,-that, if it is doubtless possible quite
erroneously to treat all men as having a considerable element
of mysticism in them, and hence to strain and spoil souls
belonging to one of the other types: it is equally possible to
starve those that possess this element in an opera ti ve degree.
Atrophy is as truly a malady as plethora.
And here the question is an individual one: would that
particular temperament and psycho-physical organism con-
genial to Sister Lukardis, to Catherine Fiesca Adorna, to
l\Iarguerite Marie Alacocque, and to Isaac Hecker, have-
taking the whole existence and output together-produced
more useful work, and have apprehended and presented more
of abiding truth, had their ecstatic states or tendencies been,
if possible, absent or suppressed? Does not this type of
apprehension. this, as it were, incubation, harmonization, and
vivifying of their otherwise painfully fragmentary and heavy
impressions, stand out,-in their central, creative periods,-as
the one thoroughly appropriate means and form of their true
self-development and self-expression, and of such an appre-
hension and showing forth of spiritual truth as to them,-to
them and not to you and me,-was possible? And if we are
bound to admit that, even in such cases, ecstasy appears,
psycho-physically, as a kind of second state, and that these
personalities find or regain their fullest joy and deepest
strength only in and from such a state; yet we know too that
such ecstasy is not, as in the trances of hysteria and of other
functional disorders, simply discontinuous from the ordinary,
primary state of such souls; and that,-again contrary to
those 1naladij trances,-whenever the ecstasy answers to the
tests insisted upon by the great mystics, viz. a true and
PSYCHO-PHYSICAL AND TEMPERAMENTAL 59
valuable ethico-spiritual content and effect, it also, in the long
run, leaves the very body strengthened and improved.
And if, after this, their productive period, some of these
persons end by losing their psycho-physical health, it is far
from unreasonable to suppose that the actual alternative to
those ecstasies and this break-up, would, for then'l, have been
a lifelong dreary languor and melancholy self-absorption,
somewhat after the pattern of Catherine's last ten pre-con-
version years. Thus for her, and doubtless for most of the
spiritually considerable ecstatics, life was, taken all in all,
indefinitely happier, richer, and more fruitful in religious truth
and holiness, with the help of those ecstatic states, than it
would have been if these states had been absent or could
have been suppressed.
And thirdly, here again, even from the point of view of
psycho-physical health and its protection, it is precisely the
actual practice and, as interpreted by it, the deepest sayings
of the standard Christian mystics which are being most
powerfully confirmed,-although necessarily by largely new
reasons and with important modifications in the analysis and
application of their doctrine,-by all that we have gained,
during the last forty years, in definite knowledge of the
psycho-physical regions and functions of human nature, and,
during two centuries and more, in enlargement and precision
of our religious-historical outlook.
If we consider the specific health-dangers of this way, we
shall find, I think, that their roots are ever two. These
dangers, and with them the probability of delusion or at least
of spiritual barrenness, always become actual, and often acute,
the minute that we allow ourselves to attach a primary and
independent importance to the psycho-physical form and
means of these things, as against their spiritual-ethical con-
tent, suggestions, and end; or that we take the whole man,
or at least the whole of the religious man, to consist of the
specifically mystical habits and life alone. Now the first of
these dangers has been ceaselessly exposed and fought by
all the great ethical and Christian mystics of the past, e. g.
St. John of the Cross and St. Teresa; and the latter has
been ever enforced by the actual practice, as social religion-
ists, of these same m:ystics, even if and when some of their
sayings, or the logical drift of their speculative system, left
insufficient room or no intrinsic necessity and function for such
things.
60 THE
IYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
(5) And everything that has happened and is happening in
the world of psychological and philosophical research, in the
world of historico-critical investigation into the past history
and modalities of religion, and in the world of our own present
religious experience and requirements, has but brought to
light fresh facts, forces, and connections, in proof both of the
right and irreplaceableness of the Mystical element in life and
religion, and of the reality and constant presence of these its
two dangers. For, as to these dangers, we now know, with
extraordinary clearness and certainty, how necessary, constant
and far-reaching is, on its phenomenal surface, the auto-sug-
gestive, mono-ideistic power and mechanism of the mind; yet
how easily, in some states, too much can be made of such
vivid apprehensions and quasi-sensible imagings of invisible
reality,-things admirable as means, ruinous as ends. And
we also know, with an astonishing universality of application,
how great a multiplicity in unity is necessarily presented by
every concrete object and by every mental act and emotional
state of every sane human being throughout every moment of
his waking life; and how this unity is actually constituted
and measured by the multiplicity of the materials and by the
degree of their harmonization.-Hence, not the absence of
the
lystical element, but the presence both of it and of the
other constituents of religion, will turn out to be the safeguard
of our deepest life and of its sanity, a sanity which demands
a balanced furness of the soul's three fundamental pairs of
activities: sensible perception and picturing memory; re-
flection, speculative and analytic; and emotion and volition,
all issuing in interior and exterior acts, and these latter, again,
providing so much fresh material and occasions for renewed
action and for a growing unification in an increasing variety,
on and on.
The metaphysical and faith questions, necessarily raised by
the phenomenal facts and mechanisms here considered, but
which cannot be answered at this level, will be discussed in a
later chapter. Here we can but once more point out, in con-
clusion, that no amount of admitted or demonstrated auto-
suggestion or mono-ideism in the phenomenal reaches and
mechanism of the mind decides, of itself, anything whatsoever
about, and still less against, the objective truth and spiritual
value of the ultimate causes, dominant ideas, and final results
of the process; nor as to whether and how far the whole
great movement is, at botton1, occasioned and directed by the
PSYCHO-PHYSICAL AND TEMPERAMENTAL 6I
Supreme Spirit, God, working, in and through man, towards
man's apprehension and manifestation of Himself.!
1 I owe much clearness of conception as to the function of auto-sug-
gestion and mono-ideism to the very remarkable paper of Prof. Emile
Boutroux. .. La Psychologie du Mysticisme/' in the Bulletin de I'Institut
Psychologique International. Paris. 1902, pp. 9-26: Engl. tr. in the
International Journal 01 Ethics, Philadelphia. Jan. 1908. There are also
many most useful facts and reflections in Prof. Henri Joly's Psychology
oj the Saints. Engl. tr' lI 189 8 . pp. 64-117.
CHAPTER X
THE MAIN LITERARY SOURCES OF CATHERINE'S
CONCEPTIONS
INTRODUCTORY.
I. The main literary sources of Catherine's teaching are four.
The main literary sources of Gatherine's conceptions can be
grouped under four heads: the New Testament, Pauline and
Johannine writings; the Ghristian Neo-Platonist, Areopagite
books; and the Franciscan, J acopone da Todi's teachings.
And here, as in all cases of such partial dependence, we have
to distinguish between the apparently accidental occasions
(her seemingly fortuitous acquaintance with these particular
writings), and the certainly necessary causes (the intrinsic
requirements of her own mind and soul, and its special
reactions under, and transformations of, these materials and
stimulations). And during this latter process this mind's
original trend itself undergoes, in its turn, not only much
development, but even some modification. She would no
doubt owe her close knowledge of the first two sets of writ-
ings to the Augustinian Ganonesses, (her sister Limbania
amongst them,) and to their Augustinian-Pauline tradition;
her acquaintance with the third set, to her Dominican cousin;
and her intimacy with the fourth, to the Franciscans of the
Hospital. Yet only her own spiritual affinity for similar
religious states and ideals, and her already at least partial
experience of them, could ever have made these writings to
her what they actually became: direct stimulations, indeed
considerable elements and often curiously vivid expressions,
of her own immediate interior life.
2. Plan of the following st'ltdy of these sources.
I shall, in this chapter, first try to draw out those character-
istics of each group, which were either specially accepted or
transformed, neglected or supplanted by her, and carefully to
note the particular nature of these her reactions and refashion-
62
SOURCES OF CATHERINE'S CONCEPTIONS 63
ings. And I shall end up by a short account of what she
and all four sets have got in common, and of what she has
brought, as a gift of her own, to that common stock which had
given her so much. And since her distinct and direct use of
the Pauline and Johanninewritings:is quite certain, whereas all
her knowledge of Neo-Platonism seems to have been mediated
by pseudo-Dionysius alone, and all her Franciscanism appears,
as far as literary sources go, to take its rise from jacopone, I
shall give four divisions to her chief literary sources, and a
fifth section to the stream common to them an.!
I. THE PAULINE WRITINGS: THE Two SOURCES OF
THEIR PRE-CONVERSION ASSUMPTIONS; GATHERINE'S
PREPONDERANT ATTITUDE TOWARDS EACH POSITION.
It is well that the chronological order requires us to begin
with St. Paul, for he is probably, if not the most extensive,
yet the most intense of all these influences upon Catherine's
mind. I here take the points of his experience and teaching
which thus concern us in the probable order of their develop-
ment in the Apostle's own consciousness,-his pre-conversion
assumptions and positions, first, and the convictions gained
at and after his conversion or clarified last; 2 and under each
heading I shall group together, once for all, the chief reactions
of Catherine's religious consciousness.
Now those Pauline pre-conversion assumptions and positions
come from two chief sources-Palestinian, Rabbinical j udaism
(for he was the disciple of the Pharisee, Gamaliel, at Jerusalem),
and a Hellenistic religiousness closely akin to, though not
derived from, Philo (for he had been born in the intensely
Hellenistic Cilician city Tarsus, at that time a most im-
portant seat of Greek learning in general and of the Stoic
philosophy in particular). And we shall find that Catherine
1 In Chapter XII.
iv. I shall show reason for strongly suspecting
that Catherine possessed some knowledge. probably derived from an
intermediate Christian source. of certain passages in Plato's Dialogues.
But the influence of these passages can. in any case. only be traced in
her Purgatorial doctrine, and had better be discussed together with this
doctrine itself.
I My chief obligations are here to Prof. H. J. Holtzmann's Lehrbuch
de,. Neutestamentlichen Theologie. 1897. Vol. II. pp. 1- 22 5: II Der
Paulinismus ..; but I have also learnt from Estius and Dr. Lightfoot.
and from my own direct studies in St. Paul. Philo. and Plato.
64 THE MYSTIGAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
appropriates especially this, his Hellenistic element; indeed,
that at times she sympathizes rather with the still more
intensely Hellenistic attitude exemplified by Philo, than
with the limitations introduced by St. Paul.
I. St. Paul's A nthropology in general.
If we take the Pauline Anthropology first, we at once
come upon a profoundly dualistic attitude.
(1) There is, in general, U the outer" and U the inner" man,
2 Cor. iv, 16; and the latter is not the exclusive privilege
of the redeemed,-the contrast is that between the merely
natural individual and the moral personality. And this con-
trast, foreign to the ancient Hebrews, is first worked out, with
clear consciousness, by Plato, who, e. g., in his Banquet, causes
one of the characters to say: U Socrates has thrown this
Silenus-like form around himself externally, as in the case of
those Silenus-statues which enclose a statuette of Apollo; but,
when he is opened, how full is he found to be of temperance
within" ; and who treats this contrast as typical of the dualism
inherent to all human life here on earth. 1 -This contrast
exists throughout Catherine's teaching as regards the thing
itself, although her terms are different. She has, for reasons
which will appear presently, no one constant term for U the
inner man," but H the outer man" is continuously styled H la
umanità. "
(2) The H outer man " consists for St. Paul of the body's earthly
material, H the flesh "; and of the animating principle of the
flesh, H the psyche," which is inseparably connected with that
flesh, and which dies for good and all at the death of the
latter; whereas the form of" the body" is capable of resuscita-
tion, and is then filled out by a finer material, H glory." 2_
Here Catherine has no precise or constant word for the
(( psyche" ; her H ulnanità " generally stands for the It psyche"
Plus body and flesh, all in one; and her H anima" practically
always means part or the whole of It the inner man," and
mostly stands for U mind." And there is no occasion for her
to reflect upon any distinction between the form and the
matter of the body, since she nowhere directly busies herself
with the resurrection.
The U inner man " consists for St. Paul in the Mind, the
Heart, and the Conscience. The Mind (noûs), corresponding
roughly to our theoretical and practical Reason, has a certain
tendency towards God: It The invisible things of God are
1 Symposium. 216e. J I Cor. xv. 35-53.
SOURCES OF CA THERINE'S CONCEPTIONS 6S
seen by the mind in the works of creation," Rom. i, 20; and
there is (( a law of the mind" which is fought by U the law of
sin," Rom. vii, 23; and this, although there is also a U mind
of the flesh," Co1. ii, 18; U a reprobate mind," Rom. i, 28;
and a (( renovation of the mind," Rom. xii, 2.-Catherine
clings throughout most closely to the Pauline use of the term,
as far as that use is favourable: note how she perceives
invisible things U colla mente mia."
The Heart is even more accessible to the divine influence,-
at least, it is to it that God gives U the first fruits of the Spirit 17
and U the Spirit of His Son, crying Abba, Father," Gal. iv, 6;
2 Cor. i, 22. As an organ of immediate perception it is so
parallel to the Mind, that we can hear of U eyes of the heart" ;
yet it is also the seat of feeling, of will, and of moral conscious-
ness, Eph. i, 18; 2 Cor. ii, 4; I Cor. iv, 5; Rom. ii, 15. It
can stand for the inner life generally; or, like the Mind, it
can become darkened and impenitent; whilst again, over the
heart God's love is poured out, God's peace keeps guard, and
we believe with the heart, I Cor. xiv, 25; Rom. i, 21; ii, 5;
v, 5; Phil. iv, 7; Rom. x, g.-All this again, as far as it is
fa vourable, is closely followed by Catherine; indeed the per-
sistence with which she comes back to certain effects wrought
upon her heart by the Spirit, Christ,-effects which some of
her followers readily interpreted as so many physical miracles,
-was no doubt occasioned or stimulated by 2 Cor. iii, 3, U Be
ye an epistle of Christ, written by the Spirit of the living
God . . . upon the fleshly tables of the heart."
And Conscience, U Syneidesis "-that late Greek word intro-
duced by St. Paul as a technical term into the Christian
vocabulary-includes our U conscience," but is as compre-
hensive as our U consciousness." -Catherine practically never
uses the term: no doubt because, in the narrower of the two
senses which had become the ordinary one, it was too
predominantly ethical to satisfy her overwhelmingly religious
preoccupa tions.
(3) Now, with regard to this whole dualism of the (( outer"
and the U inner man," its application to the resurrection of
the body in St. Paul and in St. Catherine shall occupy us in
connection with her Eschatology; here I would but indicate
the two Pauline moods or attitudes towards the earthly body,
and Catherine's continuous reproduction of but one of these.
For his magnificent conception of the Christian society,
in which each person, by a different specific gift and duty,
VOL.li. F
66 THE 1IYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
co-operates towards the production of an organic whole, a whole
which in return develops and dignifies those its constituents,
is worked out by means of the image of the human
earthly body, in which each member is a necessary part
and constituent of the complete organism, which is greater
than, and which gives full dignity to, each and all these its
factors (I Cor. xii). And he thus, in his most deliberate and
systematic mood, shows very clearly how deeply he has
realized the dignity of the human body, as the instrument
both for the development of the soul itself and for the work
of that soul in and upon the visible world.
But in his other mood, which remains secondary and
sporadic throughout his writings, his attitude is acutely
dualistic. His one direct expression of it occurs in 2 Cor.
v, 1-4: (( For we know that, if our earthly house of this tent
be dissolved, we have a building of God,.a house not made
with hands, eternal in the heavens. For in this also we groan,
desiring to be clothed upon with our habitation that is from
heaven. We who are in this tabernacle do groan, being
l?urthened." Now this passage is undoubtedly modelled by
St. Paul upon the Book of Wisdom, ix, IS: (( For the cor-
ruptible body is a load upon the soul, and the earthly
habitation presseth down the mind that museth upon many
things.'" And this latter saying again is as certainly formed
upon Plato (Phaedo, 81 c): II It behoves us to think of the
body as oppressive ånd heavy and earthlike and visible. And
hence the soul, being of such a nature as we have seen, when
possessing such a body, is both burthened and dragged down
again into the visible world." 1 And it is this conception of
the Hellenic Athenian Plato (about 380 B.C.) which, passing
through the Hellenistic Alexandrian Jewish Wisdom-writer
(80 B.C. ?) and then through the Hellenistically tinctured ex-
Rabbi, Paul of Tarsus (52 A.D.), still powerfully, indeed all but
continuously, influences the mind of the Genoese Christian
Catherine" especially during the years from A.D. 1496 to
ISla.
Catherine's still more pessimistic figure of the body as a
prison-house and furnace of purification for the soul, is no
doubt the resultant of suggestions received, probably in part
through intermediary literature, from the following three
1 E. Grafe. "Verhä1tniss der paulinischen Schriften zur Sapientia
Salomonis:. in Theol. Abhandlungen Carl von Weizsãcker Gew'z"dmet.
1892. pp. 274-276.
SOURGES OF CATHERINE'S CONCEPTIONS 67
passages :-(I) Plato, in his Cratylus (400 B.C.), makes Socrates
say: U Some declare that the body (sõma) is the grave (së111a)
of the soul, as she finds herself at present. The Orphite
poets seem to have invented the appellation: they held that
the soul is thus paying the penalty of sin, and that the body
is an enclosure which may be likened to a prison, in which
the soul is enclosed until the penalty is paid." (2) St.
Matt. v, 25, 26, gives Our Lord's words: It Be thou re-
conciled with thine adversary whilst he is still with thee on
the way. . . lest the Judge hand thee over to the prison-
warder, and thou be cast into prison. . . . Thou shalt not go
forth thence, until thou hast paid the uttermost farthing."
And (3) St. Paul declares, I Cor. iii, IS: (( Every man's work
shall be tested by fire. If any man's work shall be burned,
he shall suffer loss: but he himself shall be saved; yet so
as through fire." These three passages combined will readily
suggest, to a soul thirsting for purification and possessed of
an extremely sensitive psycho-physical organization with i
attendant liability to fever heats, the picture of the bod
as,
a flame-full prison-house,-a purgatory of the soul. ;
_ _
2. St. Paul's conception of (( Spirit. JJ 7í II ."A.....
A very difficult complication and varying element,.l' . .
introduced into St. Paul's Anthropology by the terII:1 in INn' C.,'
which he has poured all that is most original, deepest;
most
deliberate and abiding in his teaching,-the Spirit, (( Pneuma."
For somewhat as he uses the term (( Sarx," the flesh, both in its
loose popular signification of (( mankind in general "; and in
a precise, technical sense of (( the matter which composes the
earthly body" ; so also he has, occasionally, a loose popular use
of the term (( spirit," when it figures as but a fourth parallel
to (( mind," (( heart," and (( conscience"; and, usually, a very
strict and technical use of it, when it designates the Spirit,
God Himself.
(I) Now it is precisely in the latter case that his doctrine
attains its fullest depth and its greatest difficulty. For here
the Spirit, the Pneuma, is, strictly speaking, only one-the
Spirit of God, God Himself, in His action either outside or
inside the human mind, N oûs. And in such passages of St.
Paul, where man seems to possess a distinct pneuma of his
own, by far the greater number only apparently contradict
this doctrine. For in some, so in I Cor. ii, the context is
dominated by a comparison between the divine and the
human consciousness" so that" in v. II, man's Noûs is
68 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
designated Pneuma, and in v. 16, and Rom. xi, 34, the Lord's
Pneuma is called His N oûs. And the U spirit of the world "
contrasted here, in v. II, with the U Spirit of God," is a still
further deliberate laxity of expression, similar to that of
Satan as U the God of this world," 2 Cor. iv, 4. In other
passages,-so Rom. viii, 16; i, 9; viii, 10, and even in 1 Cor.
v, 5 (the U spirit" of the incestuous Corinthian which is to be
saved),-we seem to have U spirit" either as the mind in so far
as the object of the Spirit's communications, or as the mind
transformed by the Spirit's influence. And if we can hear of
a U defilement of the spirit," 2 Cor. vii, I, we are also told
that we can forget the fact of the body being the temple of
the holy Spirit, I Cor. vi, 19; and that this temple's profana-
tion U grieves the holy Spirit," Eph. iv, 30. Very few, sporadic,
and short passages remain in which It the spirit of man"
cannot clearly be shown to have a deliberately derivative
sense.
Catherine, in this great matter, completely follows S1. Paul.
For she too has loosely-knit moods and passages, in which
U spirito" appears as a natural endowment of her own,
parallel to, or identical with, the U mente." But when
speaking strictly, and in her intense moods, she means by
II spirito," the Spirit, Christ, Love, God, a Power which, though
in its nature profoundly distinct and different from her entire
self-seeking self, can and does come to dwell within, and to
supplant, this self. Indeed her highly characteristic saying,
(( my Me is God," with her own explanations of it, expresses,
if pressed, even more than this. In these moods, the term
(( mente" is usually absent, just as in St. Paul.
Now in his formally doctrinal Loci, St. Paul defines the
Divine Pneuma and the human Sarx, not merely as ontologic-
ally contrary substances, but as keenly conflicting, ethically
contradictory principles. An anti-spiritual power, lust,
possesses the flesh and the whole outer man, whilst, in an
indefinitely higher degree and manner, the Spirit, which finds
an echo in the mind, the inner man, is a spontaneous, counter-
working force; and these two energies fight out the battle in
man, and for his complete domination, Rom. vi, 12-14; vii,
22, 23; viii, 4- 1 3. And this dualistic conception is in close
affinity to all that was noblest in the Hellenistic world of S1.
Paul's own day; but is in marked contrast to the pre-exilic,
specifically Jewish Old Testament view, where we have but
the contrast between the visible and transitory, and the
SOURCES OF CATHERINE'S CONCEPTIONS 69
Invisible and Eternal; and the consciousness of the weakness
and fallibility of " flesh and blood." And this latter is the
temper of mind that dominates the Synoptic Gospels: "The
spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak"; and" Father,
forgive them, for they know not what they do," are here the
divinely serene and infinitely fruitful leading notes.-And
Catherine, on this point, is habitually on the Synoptist side:
man is, for her, far more weak and ignorant than forcibly and
deliberately wicked. Yet her detailed intensity towards the
successive cloaks of self-love is still, as it were, a shadow and
echo of the fierce, and far more massive, flesh-and-spirit
struggle in St. Paul.
3. The Angry and the Loving God.
And, as against the intense wickedness of man, we find in
St. Paul an emphatic insistence-although this is directly
derived from the Old Testament and Rabbinical tradition-
upon the anger and indignation of God, Rom. ii, 8, and
frequently.-Here Gatherine is in explicit contrast with him,
in so far as the anger would be held to stand for an emotion
not proceeding from love and not ameliorative in its aim and
operation. This attitude sprang no doubt, in part, from the
strong influence upon her of the Dionysian teaching concerning
the negative character of evil; possibly still more from her
continuous pondering of the text, " Like as a father pitieth
his children, so the Lord pitieth them that fear Him.
For He knoweth our frame; He remembereth that we
are dust," Ps. ciii, 13, 14,-where she dwells upon the fact
that we are all His children rather than upon the fact that
we do not all fear Him; but certainly, most of an, from
her habitual dwelling upon the other side of St. Paul's
teaching, that concerning the Love of God.
Now the depth and glow of Paul's faith and love go
clearly back to his conversion, an event which colours and
influences all his feeling and teaching for some thirty- four
years, up to the end. And similarly Catherine's conversion-
experience has been found by us to determine the sequence
and all the chief points of her Purgatorial teaching, some
thirty-seven years after that supreme event.
Already Philo had, under Platonic influence, believed in an
Ideal Man, a Heavenly l\lan; had identified him with the
Logos, the Word or Wisdom of God; and had held him to be
in some way ethereal and luminous,-never arriving at either
a definitely personal or a simply impersonal conception of
.
70 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
this at one time intermediate Being, at another time this
supreme attribute of God. St. Paul, under the profound
impression of the Historic Christ and the great experience on
the road to Damascus, perceives the Risen, Heavenly Jesus as
possessed of a luminous, ethereal body, a body of " glory,"
Acts xxii, II. And this Christ is, for St. Paul, identical with
" the Spirit" : "the Lord is the Spirit," 2 Cor. iii, 17; and" to
be in Christ " and " Christ is in us " are parallel terms to those
of " to be in the Spirit" and" the Spirit is within us " respect-
ively. In an four cases we get Christ or the Spirit conceived
as an element, as it were an ocean of ethereal light, in which
souls are plunged and which penetrates them. In Catherine
we have, at her conversion, this same perception and con-
ception of Spirit as an ethereal light, and of Christ as Spirit;
and up to the end she more and more appears to herself to
bathe, to be submerged in, an ocean of light, which, at the
same time, fills her within and penetrates her through and
through.
But again, and specially since his conversion, St. Paul
thinks of God as loving, as Love, and this conception hence-
forth largely supplants the Old Testament conception of the
angry God. This loving God is chiefly manifested through
the loving Christ: indeed the love of Christ and the love of
God are the same thing. And this Christ-Love dwells within
us. 1 And Catherine, since her mind has perceived Love to
be the central character of God, and has adopted fire as love's
fullest image, cannot but hold,-God and Love and Christ
and Spirit being all one and the same thing,-that Christ-
Spirit-Fire is in her and she in It. The yellow light-image,
which all but alone typifies God's friend1iness in the Bible, is
thus turned into a red fire-image. And yet this latter in so
far retains with Catherine something of its older connotation
of anger, that the Fire and Heat appear in her teaching more
as symbols of the suffering caused by the opposition of man's
at least partial impurity to the Spirit, Christ, Love, God, and
of the pain attendant upon that Spirit's action, even where it
can still purify; whereas the Light and Illumination mostly
express the peaceful penetration of man's spirit by God's
Spirit, and the blissful gain accruing from such penetration.
1 II The love of Christ'" Rom. viii, 35, is identical with" the love of
God which is in Christ] eSTIs," Rom. viii, 39. .. The Spirit of God dwelleth
in you," Rom. viii, 9; 1 Cor. iii. 16. .. I live, not I: but Christ liveth
in me," Gal. ii. 20.
SOURCES OF CATHERINE'S CONCEPTIONS 71
4. The Risen Christ and the Heavenly Adam.
St. Paul dwells continuously upon the post-earthly, the
Risen Christ, and upon Him in His identity with the pre-
earthly, the Heavenly Man: so that the historical Jesus tends
to become, all but for the final acts in the Supper-room and
upon the Cross, a transitory episode ;-a super-earthly bio-
graphy all but supplants the earthly one, since His death and
resurrection and their immediate contexts are all but the
only two events dwelt upon, and form but the two constituents
of one inseparable whole.-Here Catherine is deeply Pauline
in her striking non-occupation with the details of the earthly
life (the scene with the Woman at the Well being the single
exception), and in her continuous insistence upon Christ as
the life-giving Spirit. Indeed, even the death is strangely
absent. There is but the one doubtful contrary instance, in
any case a quite early and sporadic one, of the Vision of the
Bleeding Christ. The fact is that, in her teaching, the self-
donation of God in general, in His mysterious love for each
individual soul, and of Christ in particular, in His Eucharistic
presence as our daily food, take all their special depth of
tenderness from her vivid realization of the whole teaching,
temper, life, and death of Jesus Christ; and that teaching
derives its profundity of feeling only from all this latter
complexus of facts and convictions.
5. Reconciliation, Justification, Sanctification.
(I) St. Paul has two lines of thought concerning Reconcilia-
tion. In the objective, juridical, more Judaic conception, the
attention is concentrated on the one moment of Christ's
death, and the consequences appear as though instantaneous
and automatic; in the other, the subjective, ethical, more
Hellenistic conception, the attention is spread over the whole
action of the Christ's incamational self-humiliation, and the
consequences are realized only if and when we strive to
imitate Him.-they are a voluntary and continuous process.
Catherine's fundamental conversion-experience and all her
later teachings attach her Reconciliation to the entire act of
ceaseless Divine" ecstasy," self-humiliation, and redemptive
immanence in Man, of which the whole earthly life and death
of Christ are the centre and culmination; but though the
human soul's corresponding action is conceived as continuous,
once it has begun, she loves to dwell upon this whole action as
itself the gift of God and the consequence of His prevenient act.
(2) As to Justification, we have again, in St. Paul, a pre-
72 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
ponderatingly Jewish juridical conception of adoption, in
which a purely vicarious justice and imputed righteousness
seem to be taught; and an ethical conception of immanent
justice, based on his own experience and expressed by means
of Hellenistic forms, according to which" the love of God hath
been shed abroad in our hearts," Rom. v, 5. And he often
insists strenuously upon excluding every human merit from
the moment and act of justification, insisting upon its being a
" free gift" of God.-Catherine absorbs herself in the second,
ethical conception, and certainly understands this love of God
as primarily God's, the Spirit's, Christ's love, as Love Itself
poured out in our hearts; and she often breaks out into angry
protests against the very suggestion of any act, or part of an
act, dear to God, proceeding from her natural or separate self,
indeed, if we press her expressions, from herself at all.
(3) As to Sanctification, St. Paul has three couples of con-
trasted conceptions. The first couple conceives the Spirit,
either Old Testament-wise, as manifesting and accrediting
Itself in extraordinary, sudden, sporadic, miracwous gifts
and doings-e. g. in ecstatic speaking with tongues; or,-and
this is the more frequent and the decisive conception,-as an
abiding, equable penetration and spiritual reformation of its
recipient. Here the faithful" live and walk in the spirit," are
"driven by the spirit," "serve God in the spirit," are" temples
of the Spirit," Gal. v, 25; Rom. viii, I4; vii, 6; I Cor. vi, I9 :
the Spirit has become the creative source of a supernatural
character-building.1-Here Catherine, in contrast to most of
her friends, who are wedded to the first view, is strongly
attached to the second view, perhaps the deepest of St. Paul's
conceptions.
The second couple conceives Sanctification either juridically
and moves dramatically from act to act,-the Sacrifice on the
Cross and the Resurrection of the Son of God, the sentence
of Justification and the Adoption as sons of God; or ethically,
and presupposes everywhere continuous processes,-beginning
with the reception of the Spirit, and ending with" the Lord
is the Spirit."-Here Catherine has curiously little of the
dramatic and prominently personal conception: only in the
imperfect soul's acutely painful moment, of standing before
and seeing God immediately after death, do we get one link
in this chain, in a somewhat modified form. For the rest,
1 JI. J. Holtzmann, op, cit. Vol. II. p. 145.
SOURGES OF CATHERINE'S CONCEPTIONS 73
the ethical and continuous conception is present practically
throughout her teaching, but in a curious, apparently para-
doxical form, to be noticed in a minute.
And the third couple either treats Sanctification as, at each
moment of its actual presence, practically infallible and com-
plete: II We who died to sin, how shall we any longer live
therein?" II Freed from sin, ye became servants of
righteousness"; "now we are discharged from the law,
having died, to that wherein we were beholden; so that we
serve in newness of spirit"; II they that are after the flesh,
do mind the things of the flesh; but they that are after
the Spirit, the things of the Spirit," Rom. vi, 2, 18; vii,
6; viii,S. Or it considers Sanctification as only approxi-
mately complete, so long as man has to live here below, not
only in the Spirit, Rom. viii, 9, but also in the flesh, Gal. ii, 20.
The faithful have indeed crucified the flesh once for all,
Gal. v, 24: yet they have continually to mortify their members
anew, Col. iii, 5, and by the Spirit to destroy the works of the
flesh, Rom. viii, 13. The" fear of the Lord," " of God," does
not cease to be a motive for the sanctified, 2 Cor. v, II; vii, I.
To " walk in the Spirit," U in the light," has to be insisted on
(I Thess. v, 4-8; Rom. xiii, 11-14), as long as the eternal day
has not yet arisen for us. And even in Romans, chapter vi,
we find admonitions, vv. 12, 13, 19, which, if we press the
other conception, are quite superfluous.!
And here Catherine, in her intense sympathy with each of
these contrasted conceptions, offers us a combination of both
in a state of unstable equilibrium and delicate tension. I take
it that it is not her immensely impulsive and impatient
temperament, nor survivals of the Old Testament idea as to
instantaneousness being the special characteristic of divine
action, but her deep and noble sense of the givenness and
pure grace of religion, and of God's omnipotence being, if
possible, exceeded only by His overflowing,self-communicative
love, which chiefly determine her curious presentation and
emotional experience of spiritual growth and life as a move-
ment composed of sudden shiftings upwards, with long
apparently complete pauses in between. For here this form
(of so many instants, of which each is complete in itself) stands
for her as the least inadequate symbol, as a kind of shattered
mirror, not of time at all, but of eternity; whilst the succession
and difference between these instants indicates a growth in
J Holt.zmann, Ope cit. Vol. II. pp. 15 1 . 152.
,
74 THE MYSTICAL ELEMEi
T OF RELIGION
the apprehending soul, which has, in reality, been proceeding
also in between these instants and not only during them.
And this remarkable scheme presents her conviction that,
in principle, the work of the all-powerful, all-loving Spirit
cannot, of itself, be other than final and complete, and yet
that, as a matter of fact, it never is so, in weak, self-deceptive,
and variously resisting man, but ever turns out to require a
fresh and deeper application. And this succession of sudden
jerks onwards and upwards, after long, apparently complete
pauses bet\veen them, gives to her fundamentally ethical and
continuous conception something of the look of the forensic,
dramatic series, with its separate acts,-a series which would
otherwise be all but unrepresented in her picture of the soul's
life on this side of death and of its life (immediately after its
vivid sight of God and its-elf, and its act of free-election) in
the Beyond.
6. Pauline Social Ethics.
As to Social Ethics, St. Paul's worldward movement is
strongly represented in Catherine's teaching. Her great
sayings as to God being servable not only in the married
state, but in a camp of (mercenary) soldiers; and as to her
determination violently to appropriate the monk's cowl,
should this his state be necessary to the attainment of the
highest love of God, are full of the tone of Rom. xiv, 14, 20,
" nothing is unclean of itself: save that to him who accounteth
anything to be unclean, to him it is unclean,"-" all things
are clean"; and of I Cor. x, 26, 28, " the earth is the Lord's,
and the fulness thereof." And her sense of her soul's positive
relation to nature, e. g. trees, was no doubt in part awakened
by that striking passage, Rom. viii, 19, " the expectation of
the creation waiteth the revealing of the sons of God; for
the creation was subjected to vanity, not of its own will."
On the other hand, it would be impossible confidently to
identify her own attitude concerning marriage with that of
St. Paul, since, as we know, her peculiar health and her
unhappiness \vith Giuliano make it impossible to speak here
with any certainty of the mature woman's deliberate judgment
concerning continence and marriage. Yet her impulsive
protestation, in the scene with the monk, against any idea of
being debarred by her state from as perfect a Jove of God as
his,-\vhilst, of course, not in contradiction with the Pauline
and generally Catholic positions in the matter, seems to
imply an emotional attitude some\vhat different from that
SOURCES OF CATHERINE'S CONCEPTIONS 75
of some of the Apostle's sayings. Indeed, in her whole
general and unconscious position as to how a woman should
hold herself in religious things it is interesting to note the
absence of all influence from those Pauline sayings which,
herein like Philo (and indeed the whole ancient world) treat
man alone as " the (direct) image and glory (reflex) of God,"
and the woman as but" the glory (reflex) of the man," I Cor.
xi, 7. Everywhere she appears full, on the contrary, of St.
Paul's other (more characteristic and deliberate) strain, ac-
cording to which, as there is " neither] ew nor Gentile, bond
nor free" before God, so " neither is the woman without the
man, nor the man without the woman, in the Lord," I Cor.
xi, II.-And in social matters generally, Catherine's convert
life and practice shows, in the active mortifications of its first
penitential part, in her persistent great aloofness from all
things of sense as regards her own gratification, and in the
ecstasies and love of solitude which marked the zenith of her
power, a close sympathy with, and no doubt in part a direct
imitation of, St. Paul's Arabian retirement, chastisement of
his body, and lonely concentration upon rapt communion
with God. Yet she as strongly exemplifies St. Paul's other,
the outward movement, the love-impelled, whole-hearted
service of the poorest, world-forgotten, sick and sorrowing
brethren. And the whole resultant rhythmic life has got
such fine spontaneity, emotional and efficacious fulness,
and expansive joy about it, as to suggest at once those
unfading teachings of St. Paul which had so largely occasioned
it,-those hymns in praise of that love" which minds not high
things but condescends to things that are lowly," Rom. xii,
16; "becomes all things to all men," I Cor. ix, 22; "rejoices
with them that rejoice, and weeps with them that weep,"
Rom. xii, IS; and which, as the twin love of God and man,
is not only the chief member of the central ethical triad, but,
already here below, itself becomes the subject which exercises
the other two virtues, for it is "love "that" believeth all
things, hopeth all things," even before that eternity in
which love alone will never vanish away, ibid. xiii, 7
8 .
Here Catherine with Paul triumphs completely over time:
their actions and teaching are as completely fresh now,
after well-nigh nineteen and four centuries, as when they
first experienced, willed, and uttered theine
7. Sacral1zeJltal teachings.
In Sacramental matters it is interesting to note St. Paul's
7 6 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
close correlation of Baptism and the Holy Eucharist: II All
(our fathers) were baptized unto Moses in the cloud and in
the sea; and did all eat the same spiritual meat; and did all
drink the same spiritual drink," I Cor. x, 3; "in one Spirit
were we all baptized into one body, . . . and were all made to
drink of one Spirit," Christ, His blood, ibid. xii, 13. And
Catherine is influenced by these passages, when she represents
the soul as hungering for, and drowning itself in, the ocean of
spiritual sustenance which is Love, Christ, God: but she
attaches the similes, which are distributed by St. Paul among
the two Rites, to the Holy Eucharist alone. Baptism had
been a grown man's deliberate act in Paul's case,-an act
immediately subsequent to, and directly expressive of, his
conversion, the culminating experience of his life; and, as
a great Church organizer, he could not but dwell with an
equal insistence upon the two chief Sacraments.
Catherine had received baptism as an unconscious infant,
and the event lay far back in that pre-conversion time, which
was all but completely ousted from her memory by the great
experience of some twenty-five years later. And in the latter
experience it was (more or less from the first and soon
all but exclusively) the sense of a divine encirclement and
sustenance, of an addition of love, rather than a consciousness
of the subtraction of sins or of a divine purification, that
possessed her. In her late, though profoundly characteristic
Purgatorial teaching, the soul again plunges into an ocean;
but now, since the soul is rather defiled than hungry, and wills
rather to be purified than to be fed, this plunge is indeed a
kind of Baptism by Immersion. Yet we have no more the
symbol of water, for the long state and effects to which that
swift act leads, but we have, instead, fire and light, and, in
one place, once again bread and the hunger for bread. And
this is no doubt because, in these Purgatorial picturings, it is
her conversion-experience of love under the symbols of light
and of fire, and her forty years of daily hungering for the Holy
Eucharist and Love Incarnate, which furnish the emotional
colours and the intellectual outlines.
8. Eschatological n
atters.
In Eschatological matters the main points of contact and
of contrast appear to be four; and three of the differences are
occasioned by St. Paul's preoccupation with Christ's Second
Coming, with the Resurrection of the body, and with the
General Judgment, mostly as three events in close temporal
SOURCES OF CATHERINE'S CONCEPTIONS 77
correlation, and likely to occur soon; whilst Catherine
abstracts entirely from all three.
(I) Thus St. Paul is naturally busy with the question as to
the Time when he shall be with Christ. In I Thess. iv, IS, he
speaks of "we that are alive, that are left for the coming
of the Lord," i. e. he expects this event during his own
lifetime; whilst in Phil. i, 23, he H desires to depart and
be with Christ," i. e. he has ceased confidently to expect this
coming before his own death. But Catherine dwells exclu-
sively, with this latter conception, upon the moment of death,
as that when the soul shall see, and be finally confirmed in its
union with, Love, Christ, God; for into her earthly lifetime
Love, Christ, God, can and do come, but invisibly, and she
may still lose full union with them for ever.
(2) As to the Place, it is notoriously obscure whether St.
Paul thinks of it, as do the Old Testament and the
Apocalypse, as the renovated earth, or as the sky, or as the
intervening space. The risen faithful who" shall be caught up
in the clouds to meet the Lord," I Thess. iv, IJ, seem clearly
to be meeting Him, in mid-air, as He descends upon earth;
and" Jerusalem above," Gal. iv, 26, may well, as in Apoc. iii,
I2; xxi, 2, be conceived as destined to come down upon
earth. But Catherine, though she constantly talks of Heaven,
Purgatory, Hell, as II places," makes it plain that such ee places"
are for her but vivid symbols for states of soul. God Himself
repeatedly appears in her sayings as H the soul's place"; and
it is this (( place," the soul's true spiritual birthplace and home
which, ever identical and bliss-conferring in itself, is variously
experienced by the soul, in exact accordance with its dispo-
sitions,-as that profoundly painful, or that joyfully distress-
ing, or that supremely blissful" place" which respectively we
call Hell, and Purgatory, and Heaven.
(3) As to the Body, we have already noted St. Paul's doctrine
intermediate between the Palestinian and Alexandrian Jewish
teaching, that it will rise indeed, but composed henceforth of
" glory" and no more of "flesh." It is this his requirement
of a body, however spiritual, which underlies his anxiety to
be" found clothed, not naked," at and after death, 2 Cor. v, 3.
Indeed, in this whole passage, v, I-4, " our earthly house of
this habitation," and "a building of God not made with
hands," no doubt mean, respectively, the present body of flesh
and the future body of glory; just as the various, highly com-
plex, conceptions of "clothed'" "unclothed," "clothed upon,"
,
78 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
refer to the different conditions of the soul with a body of
flesh, without a body at aU, and with a body of glory.-Now
this passage, owing to its extreme complication and abstruse-
ness of doctrine, has come down to us in texts and versions of
every conceivable form; and this uncertainty has helped
Catherine towards her very free utilization of it. For she
not only, as ever, simply ignores all questions of a risen body,
and transfers the concept of a luminous ethereal substance
from the body to the soul itself, and refers the" nakedness,"
" unclothing," " clothing," and" clothing upon" to conditions
obtaining, not between the soul and the body, but between
the soul and God; but she also, in most cases, takes the
nakedness as the desirable state, since typical of the soul's
faithful self-exposure to the all-purifying rays of God's light
and fire, and interprets the" unclothing" as the penitential
stripping from off itself of those pretences and corrupt
incrustations which prevent God's blissful action upon it.
(4) And, finally, as to the Judgment, we have in St. Paul
a double current,-the inherited Judaistic conception of a
forensic retribution; Christ, the divine Judge, externally
applying such and such statutory rewards and punishments to
such and such good and evil deeds,-so in Rom. ii, 6-10; and
the experimental conception, helped on to articulation by Hel-
lenistic influences, of the bodily resurrection and n1an's whole
final destiny as the necessary resultant and manifestation of
an internal process, the presence of the Spirit and of the
power of God,-so in the later parts of Romans, in Gal. vi, 8,
and in I Cor. vi, 14; 2 Cor. xiii, 4.-Among Catherine's say-
ings also we find some passages-but these the less character-
istic and mostly of doubtful authenticity,-where reward and
punishment, indeed the three" places" themselves, appear as
so many separate institutions of God, which get externally
applied to certain good and evil deeds. But these are com-
pletely overshadowed in number, sure authenticity, emotional
intensity, and organic connection with her other teachings, by
sayings of the second type, where the soul's fate is but the
necessary consequence of its own deliberate choice and gradu-
ally formed dispositions, the result, inseparable since the first
from its self-identification with this or that of the various
possible will-attitudes towards God.
(5) We can then sum up the main points of contact and of
difference between Paul and Gatherine, by saying that, in
both cases, everything leads up to, or looks back upon, a great
SOURCES OF CATHERINE'S CONCEPTIONS 79
culminating, directly personal experience of shortest clock-
time duration, whence all their doctrine, wherever emphatic, is
but an attempt to articulate and universalize this original
experience; and that if in Paul there remains more of explicit
occupation with the last great events of the earthly life of
Jesus, yet in both there is the same insistence upon the life-
giving Spirit, the eternal Christ, manifesting His inexhaustible
power in the transformation of souls, on and on, here and
now, into the likeness of Himself.
II. THE JOHANNINE \VRITINGS.
On moving now from the Pauline to the Johannine writ-
ings, we shall find that Catherine's obligations to these
latter are but rarely as deep, yet that they cover a wider reach
of ideas and images. I take this fresh source of influence
under the double heading of the general relations of the
Johannine teaching to other, previous or contemporary, con-
ceptions; and of this same teaching considered in itself. 1
I. ] ohannine teaching contrasted with other syste-n
s.
(I) As to the general relations towards other positions, we
get here, towards Judaism and Paganism, an emphatic insist-
ence upon the novelty and independence of Christianity as
regards not only Paganism, but even the previous Judaism,
" The law \vas given by Moses; grace and truth came by
Jesus Christ," i, I7; and upon the Logos, Christ, as " the
Light that enlighteneth everyman that cometh into the world,"
"unto his own," i. e. men in general; for this Light" was in the
world, and the world was made by Him," i, 9-11. There is
thus a divinely-implanted, innate tendency towards this light,
extant in man prior to the explicit act of faith, and operative
outside of the Christian body: "Everyone that is of the
truth heareth my voice," xviii, 37: "he that doeth the truth
cometh to the light," iii, 21: "begotten," as he is, not of man
but " of God," i, I3; I John iii, 9. And thus Samaritans,
Greeks, and Heathens act and speak in the best dispositions,
iv, 42; xii, 20-24; x, 16; whilst such terms and sayings as
"the Saviour of the World," "God so loved the world," iv, 4 2 ,
I My chief obligations are here again to Dr. H. J. Holtzmann.s
Ne-utestamentliche Theologie. 1897. Vol. II. pp. 354-39 0 ; 394-39 6 ; 399-
4 01 ; 4 2 6-43 0 ; 447-4 66 ; 4 66 -5 21 .
80 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
iii, 16, are the most universalistic declarations to be found in
the New Testament.-And this current dominates the whole
of Catherine's temper and teaching: this certainty as to the
innate affinity of every human soul to the Light, Love, Christ,
God, gives a tone of exultation to the musings of this other-
wise melancholy woman. Whereas the Johannine passages of
a contrasting exclusiveness and even fierceness of tone, such
as "all that came before Me are thieves and robbers," x, 8;
"ye are from your father the devil," viii, 44; "ye shall
die in your sin," viii, 21; "your sin remaineth," ix, 41, are
without any parallel among Catherine's sayings. Indeed it
is plain that Catherine, whilst as sure as the Evangelist that
all man's goodness comes from God, nowhere, except in her
own case, finds man's evil to be diabolic in character.
(2) With regard to Paulinism, the Johannine writings give
us a continuation and extension of the representation of the
soul's mystical union with Christ, as a local abiding in the
element Christ. Indeed it is in these writings that we find the
terms" to abide in " the light, I John ii, 10, in God, I John iv,
I3, in Christ, I John ii, 6, 24, 27, iii, 6, 24, and in His love,
John xv, 9, I John iv, 16; the corresponding expressions,
" God abideth in us/' I John iv, 12, 16, " Christ abideth in
us," I John iii, 24, and" love abideth in us," I John iv, 16;
the two immanences coupled together, where the com-
municant " abideth in Me and I in him," vi, 56, and where
the members of His mystical body are bidden to " abide in
J.\;le and I in you," xv, 4; and the supreme pattern of all these
interpenetrations, " I am in the Father, and the Father in
Me," xiv, Io.-And it is from here that Catherine primarily
gets the literary suggestions for her images of the soul
plunged into, and filled by, an ocean of Light, Love, Christ,
God; and again from here, more than from St. Paul, she
gets her favourite term }LÉlJEtlJ (It. restare), around which are
grouped, in her mind, most of the quietistic-sounding elements
of her teaching.
(3) As to the points of contact between the Johannine
teaching and Alexandrianism, we find that three are vividly
renewed by Catherine.
Philo had taught: "God ceases not from acting: as to
bum is the property of fire, so to act is the property of God,"
Legg. Alleg. I, 3. And in John we find: "God is a Spirit,"
and" My Father worketh even until now, and I work," iv, 24;
v,I7. And God as pure Spiritual Energy, as the Actus
SOURCES OF CATHERINE'S CONCEPTIONS 8t
Purus, is a truth and experience that penetrates the whole
life of Catherine.
The work of Christ is not dwelt on in its earthly begin-
nings; but it is traced up and back, in the form of a spiritual
"Genesis," to His life and work as the Logos in Heaven,
where He abides U in the bosom of the Father," and whence
He learns what He " hath declared" to us, i, 18; just as, in
his turn, the disciple whom Jesus loved U was reclining" at the
Last Supper U on the bosom of Jesus," and later on " beareth
witness concerning the things" which he had learnt there,
xiii, 23; xxi, 24. So also Catherine transcends the early
earthly life of Christ altogether, and habitually dwells upon
Him as the Light and as Love, as God in His own Self-
Manifestation; and upon the ever-abiding sustenance afforded
by this Light and Life and Love to the faithful soul reclining
and resting upon it.
And the contrast between the Spiritual and the Material,
the Abiding and the Transitory, is symbolized throughout
John, in exact accord with Philo, under the spatial categories
of upper and lower, and of extension: U Ye are from beneath, I
am from above," viii, 23; "He that cometh from heaven, is
above all," iii, 31; and" in my Father.s house," that upper
world, "there are many mansions," abiding-places, xiv, 2.
Hence all things di vine here below ha ve descended from
above: regeneration, iii, 3; the Spirit, i, 32; Angels, i, 51;
the Son of God Himself, iii, 13: and they mount once more
up above, so especially Christ Himself, iii, 13; vi, 62. And
the things of that upper world are the true things: "the true
light," U the true adorers," U the true vine,'" " the true bread
from Heaven," i, 9; iv, 23; xv, I; vi, 32: all this in contrast
to the shadowy semi-realities of the lower world.-Catherine
is here in fullest accord with the spatial imagery generally;
she even talks of God Himself, not only as in a place, but as
Himself a place, as the soul's" loco." But she has, for reasons
explained elsewhere, generally to abandon the upper-and-
lower category when picturing the soul's self-dedication to
purification, since, for this act, she mostly figures a downward
plunge into suffering; and she gives us a number of striking
sayings, in which she explicitly re-translates all this quantita-
tive spatial imagery into its underlying meaning of qualitative
spiritual states.
(4) As to the Johannine approximations and antagonisms to
Gnosticism, Catherine's position is as follo\vs. In the Synoptic
VOL. II. G
82 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
accounts, Our Lord makes the acquisition of eternal life
depend upon the keeping of the two great commandments of
the love of God and of one's neighbour, Luke x, 26-28, and
parallels. In John Our Lord says: U this is life eternal, that
they should know Thee the only true God, and Him Whom
Thou didst send, even Jesus Christ," xvii, 3. To U know,"
'YLVWUICEtV, occurs twenty-five times in 1 John alone. Here
the final object of every soul is to believe and to know:
I( they received and knew of a truth. . . and believed,"
xvii, 8; "we have believed and know," vi, 69; or I(we know
and have believed," 1 John iv, 16. And Catherine also lays
much stress upon faith ending, even here below, in a certain
vivid knowledge; but this knowledge is, with her, less
doctrinally articulated, no doubt in part because there was
no Gnosticism fronting her, to force on such articulation.
And the J ohannine writings compare this higher mental
knowledge to the lower, sensible perception: " He that cometh
from heaven," witnesseth to what he hath I( seen and heard,'1
iü, 32 ; I( if He shall be manifested, we shall see Him even as '
He is," 1 John iii, 2. And they have three special terms, in
common with Gnosticism, for the object of such knowledge:
Life, Light, and Fulness (Plerõma),-the latter, as a technical
tern1, appearing in the New Testament only in John i, 16, and
in the Epistles to the Colossians and Ephesians. Catherine,
also, is ever experiencing and conceiving the mental appre-
hensions of faith, as so many quasi-sensible, ocular, percep-
tions; and Life and Light are constantly mentioned, and
Ji"'ulness is, at least, implied in the psycho-physical con-
comitants or consequences of her thinkings.
On the other hand, she does not follow John in the intensely
dualistic elements of his teaching,-the sort of determinist, aU
but innate, distinction between" the darkness," I( the men who
loved the darkness rather than the light," and the Light itself
and those who loved it, i, 4, 5; üi, 19,-children of God and
children of the devil-the latter all but incapable of being
saved, viii, 38-47; x, 26; xi, 52; xiv, 17. Rather is she like
him in his all but complete silence as to U the anger of God,"
-a term which he uses once only, iü, 36, as against the twenty-
two instances of it in St. Paul.
And she is full to overflowing of the great central, pro-
foundly un- and anti-Gnostic, sensitively Christian teachings
of St. John: as to the Light, the only-begotten Son, having
been given by God, because God so loved the world; as to
SOURCES OF CATHERINE'S CONCEPTIONS 83
Jesus having loved his own even to the end; as to the object
of Christ's manifestation of His Father.s name to men, being
that God's love for Christ, and indeed Christ Himself, might
be within them; and as to how, if they love Him, they will
keep His commandments,-His commandment to love each
other as He has loved them, iii, 21; iii, 16; xiii, I; xvii, 26;
xiv, 15; xv, 17. In this last great declaration especially do we
find the very epitome of Catherine's life and spirit, of her who
can never think of Him as Light and Knowledge only, but
ever insists on His being Fire and Love as well; and who
has but one commandment, that of Love-impelled, Love-
seeking loving.
(5) And lastly, in relation to organized, Ecclesiastical
Christianity, the Johannine writings dwell, as regards the
more general principles, on points which, where positive, are
simply pre-supposed by Catherine; and, where negative, find
no echo within her.
The Johannine writings insist continually upon the unityand
inter-communion of the faithful: "They shall become onefold,
one shepherd"; Christ's death was in order t. that He might
gather the scattered children of God into one"; He prays
to the Father that believers" may be one, as we are one";
and He leaves as His legacy His seamless robe, x, 16; xi, 52;
xvii, 21; xix, 24. And these same writings have a painfully
absolute condemnation for all outside of this visible fold:
U The whole world lies in evil"; its" Prince is the Devil" ;
U the blood of Jesus cleanseth us from all sin," within the
community alone; false prophets, those who have gone forth
from the community, are not to be prayed for, are not even
to be saluted, I John v, 19; John xii, 31; John i, 7; v, 16;
2 John, 10. For the great and necessary fight with Gnosticism
has already begun in these writings.
But Catherine dies before the unity of Christendom is again
in jeopardy through the Protestant Reformation, and she
never dwells-this is doubtless a limit-upon the Christian
community, as such. And her enthusiastic sympathy with
the spiritual teachings of Jacopone da Todi, who, some two
centuries before, had, as one of the prophetic opposition,
vehemently attacked the intensely theocratic policy of Pope
Boniface VIII, and had suffered a long imprisonment at
his hands; her tender care for the schismatic population of
the far-away Greek island of Chios; and her intimacy with
Dre. Tommaso Moro, who, later on, became for a while a
84 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
Calvinist; all indicate how free from all suspiciousness
towards individual Catholics, or of fierceness against other
religious bodies and persons, was her deeply filial attach!nent
to the Church.
In the Synoptists Our Lord declares, as to the exorcist
,vho worked cures in His name, although not a follower of
His, that" he that is not against us, is for us," and refuses to
accede to His disciples' proposal to interfere with his activity,
l\1:ark ix, 38-41; and He points, as to the means of inheriting
etemallife, to the keeping of the two great commandments,
as these are already formulated in the Old Testament, and
insists that this neighbour, whom here we are bidden to
love, is any and every man, Luke x, 25-37. The J ohannine
writings insist strongly upon the strict necessity of full,
explicit adhesion: the commandment of love which Our Lord
gives is here" My commandment," " a new commandment,"
one held "from the beginning "-in the Christian community;
and the command to " love one another" is here addressed to
the brethren in their relations to their fellow-believers only,
xiii, 34; xiii, 35; xv, 12, 17. Catherine's feeling, in this
matter, is clearly with the Synoptists.
2. ] ohannine teaching considered in itself.
If we next take the Johannine teachings in themselves, we
shall find the following interesting points of contact or contrast
to exist between John and Catherine.
(I) In matters of Theology proper, she is completely
penetrated by the great doctrine, more explicit in St. John even
than in S1. Paul, that" God is Love," I John iv, 8; and by
the conceptions of God and of Christ" working always" as
Life, Light, and Love.-But whereas, in the first Epistle of
John, God Himself is " eternal life " and" light," v, 20; i, 5;
and, in the Gospel, it is Christ Who, in the first instance,
appears as Life and as Light, xi, 25; viii, I2: Catherine no-
where distinguishes at all between Christ and God. And
similarly, ,vhereas in St. John" God doth not give" unto
Christ" the Spirit by measure" ; and Christ promises to the
disciples" another Paraclete," i. e. the Holy Spirit, iii, 34; xiv,
I6; and indeed the Son and the Spirit appear, throughout, as
distinct from one another as do the Son and the Father: in
Catherine we get, practically everywhere, an exclusive con-
centration upon the fact, so often implied or declared by
St. Paul. of Love, Christ, being Himself Spirit.
(2) The Johannine Soteriology has, I think, influenced
SOURCES OF CATHERINE'S CONCEPTIONS 85
Catherine as follows. Christ's redemptive work appears, in
the more original current of that teaching, under the symbols of
the Word, Light, Bread, as the self-revelation of God. For in
proportion that this Logos-Light and Bread enlightens and
nourishes, does He drive away darkness and weakness, and,
with them, sin, and this previously to any historic acts of
His earthly life. And, in this connection, there is but little
stress laid upon penance and the forgiveness of sins as
compared with the Synoptic accounts, and the term of turning
back, (j'rpJcþEtV, is absent here.-But that same redemptive
work appears, in the more Pauline of the two J ohannine
currents, as the direct result of so many vicarious, atoning
deeds, the historic Passion and Death of Our Lord. Here
there is indeed sin, a " sin of the world," and specially for this
sin is Christ the propitiation: "God so loved the world, as to
give His only-begotten Son "-Him " the Lamb of God, that
taketh a wa y the sins of the world," i, 29; I John ii, 2 ; John
ii, 16; i, 29, 36.
Catherine, with the probably incomplete exception of her
Conversion and Penance-period, concentrates her attention,
with a striking degree of exclusiveness, upon the former group
of conceptions. With her too the God-Christ is-all but
solely-conceived as Light which, in so far as it is not
hindered, operates the healing and the growth of souls. And
in her great picture of all souls inevitably hungering for the
sight of the One Bread, God, she has operated a fusion
between two of the J ohannine images. the Light which is seen
and the Bread which is eaten: here the bare sight (in reality,
a satiating sight) of the Bread suffices. If, for the self-
manifesting God-Christ, she has, besides the Johaninne Light-
image, a Fire-symbol, which has its Jiterary antecedents rather
in the Old Testament than in the New, this comes from the
fact that she is largely occupied with the pain of the impres-
sions and processes undergone by already God-loving yet still
imperfectly pure souls, and that fierce fire is as appropriate a
symbol for such pain as is peaceful light for joy.
Now this painfulness is, in Catherine's teaching, the direct
result of whatever may be incomplete and piecemeal in the
soul's state and process of purification. And this her con-
ception, of Perfect Love being mostly attained only through
a series of apparently sudden shifts, each seemingly final, is
no doubt in part moulded upon the practically identical
Johannine teaching as to Faith.
86 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
True, we have already seen that her conception of the
nature of God's action upon the soul, and of the soul's reaction
under this His touch, is more akin to the rich Synoptic idea
of a disposition and determination of the soul's whole being,
(a cordial trust at least as much as an intellectual apprehension
and clear assent), than to the Johannine view, \vhich lays a
predominant stress upon mental apprehension and assent.
And again, she nowhere presents anything analogous to the
Johannine, already scholastic, formulations of the object of
this Faith and Trust,-all of them explicitly concerned with
the nature of Christ.
But, everywhere in the] ohannine \vritings, the living Person
and Spirit aimed at by these definitions is considered as
experienced by the soul in a succession of ever-deepening
intuitions and acts of Faith. Already at the Jordan, Andrew
and Nathaniel have declared Jesus to be the Christ, the Son
of God, i, 41, 49; yet they, His disciples, are said to have
believed in Him at Cana, in consequence of His miracle there,
ii, II. Already at Capernaum Peter asserts for the twelve,
H We have believed and know that Thou art the Holy One
of God," vi, 69; yet still, at the Last Supper, Christ exhorts
them to believe in Him, xiv, 10, II, and predicts future events
to them, in order that, when these predictions come true, their
faith may still further increase, xiii, 19; xiv, 29. And, as far
on as after the Resurrection we hear that the Beloved Disciple
U saw" (the empty tomb) U and believed," xx, 8, 29. We thus
get in John precisely the same logically paradoxical, but
psychologically and spiritually most accurate and profound,
combination of an apparent completeness of Faith at each
point of special illumination, with a sudden re-beginning and
impulsive upward shifting of the soul's Light and Believing,
which is so characteristic of Catherine's experience and
teaching as to the successive levels of the soul's Fire, Light
and Love. And the opposite movement-of the fading away
of the Light and the Faith-can be traced in John, as the
corresponding doctrine of the going out of the Fire, Light and
Love within the Soul can be found in Catherine.
Again, both John and Catherine are penetrated with the
sense that this Faith and Love is somehow ",raked up in souls
by a true touch of God, a touch to which they spontaneously
respond, because they already possess a substantial affinity to
Him. U His," the Good Shepherd's, U sheep hear His voice,"
x, 16; they hear it, because they are already His: the Light
SOURCES OF CATHERINE'S CONCEPTIONS 87
solicits and is accepted by the soul, because the soul itself
is light-like and light-requiring, and because it proceeds
originally from this very Light which would now reinforce
the soul's own deepest requirements. This great truth
appears also in those profound J ohannine passages: " No man
can come to Me, unless the Father which sent Me draw him" ;
and "I manifested Thy name unto the men whom Thou
ga vest Me out of the world," vi, 44; xvii, 6.
And this attractive force is also a faculty of Christ: "I will
draw all men unto Myself," xii, 32. And note how Catherine,
ever completely identifying God, Christ, Light, Love, and,
where these work in imperfectly pure souls, Fire, is stimulated
by the last-quoted text to extend God's, Christ's, Love's
drawing, attraction, to all men; to limit only, in various
degrees, these various men's response to it; and to realize so
intensely that a generous yielding to this our ineradicable
deepest attrait is our fullest joy, and the resisting it is our
one final misery, as to picture the soul, penitent for this its
mad resistance, plunging itself, now eagerly responsive to that
intense attraction, into God and a growing conformity with
Him.
(3) As to points concerning the Sacraments where Catherine
is influenced by John, we find that here again Baptismal
conceptions are passed over by her. She does not allude to
the water in the discourse to Nicodemus, iii,S, although she is
full of other ideas suggested there; but she dwells upon the
water in the address to the Woman at the Well, iv, 10-15, that
"Ii vingwa ter," which is, for her, the spirit' s spiritual sustenance,
Love, Christ, God, and insensibly glides over into the images
and experiences attaching, for her, to the Holy Eucharist.
But, as to this the greatest of the Sacraments and the all-
absorbing devotion of her life, her symbols and concepts are
all suggested by the Fourth Gospel, in contrast to the
Synoptists and St. Paul. For the Holy Eucharist is, with her,
ever detached from any direct memory of the Last Supper,
Passion, and Death, the original, historical, unique occasions
which still form its setting in the pre- J ohannine writings,
although those greatest proofs of a divinely boundless self-
immolation undoubtedly give to her devotion to the Blessed
Sacrament its beautiful enthusiasm and tenderness. The
Holy Eucharist ever appears with her, as with St. John,
attached to the scene of the multiplication of the breads,-a
feast of joy and of life l \vith Christ at the zenith of His eartWy
88 THE MYSTICAL ELE!vIENT OF RELIGION
hope and power. For not Cl a shewing of the death" in " the
eating of this bread," I Cor. xi, 26, is dwelt on by John;
but we have: " I am the living Bread. . . if any man eat
of this bread, he shall live for ever," John vi, 51.
And Gatherine follows John in thinking predominantly of
the single soul, when dwelling upon the Holy Eucharist. For
if John presents a great open-air Love-Feast in lieu of Paul's
Upper Chamber and Supper with the twelve, he, as over against
Paul's profoundly social standpoint, has, throughout this his
Eucharistic chapter, but three indications of the plural as
against some fourteen singulars.
And, finally, John's change from the future tense, with its
reference to a coming historic institution, "the meat which . . .
the Son of l\ian shall give unto you," vi, 27, to the present
tense, with its declaration of an eternal fact and relation, "I
am " (now and always) " the living bread which came down
out of heaven," vi, 51, will have helped Catherine towards the
conception of the eternal Christ -God offering Himself as their
ceaseless spiritual food to His creatures, possessed as they are
by an indestructible spiritual hunger for Himself. For if the
Eucharistic food, Bread, Body, has already been declared by
St. Paul to be "spiritual," 2 Gor. iii, 17, in St. John also
it has to be spiritual, for it is here" the true bread from
heaven " and " the bread of life " ; and Christ declares here
" it is the Spirit that quickeneth, the flesh (alone) profiteth
nothing," vi, 32, 63. Hence Catherine is, again through the
Holy Eucharist and St. John, brought back to her fa vourite
Pauline conception of the Lord as Himself" Spirit," "the
Life-giving Spirit," 2 Cor. iii, 17; I Cor. xv, 45.
(4) And if we conclude with the Johannine Eschatology, we
shall find that Catherine has penetrated deep into the follow-
ing conceptions, which undoubtedly, even in their union,
present us with a less rich outlook than that furnished by the
Synoptists, but which may be said to constitute the central
spirit of Our Lord's teaching.
Like John, who has but two mentions of " the Kingdom of
God," iii, 3, 5, and who elsewhere ever speaks of " Life,"
Catherine has nowhere "the Kingdom," but everywhere
"Life." Like him she conceives the process of Conversion as
a "making alive" of the moribund, darkened, cold soul, by
the Light, Love, Christ, God, v, 21-29, when He, Who is
Himself" the Life," xi, 25, and" the Spirit," iv, 24, speaks to
the soul" words" that are" spirit and life," vi, 63; for then
SOURCES OF CATHERINE'S CONCEPTIONS 89
the soul that gives ear to His words U hath eternal life,"
v, 24.
Again Catherine, for the most part, appropriates and de-
velops that one out of the two Johannine currents of doctrine
concerning the Judgment, which treats the latter as already
detennined and forestalled by Man's present personal attitude
towards the Light. The judgment is thus simply a discrimina-
tion, according to the original meaning of the noun "pílTt
-like
when God in the beginning U divided the light from the
darkness," Gen. i, 5; a discrimination substantially effected
already here and now, U he that believeth on Him, is not
judged; he that believeth not hath been judged already,"
iii, 18. But the other current of doctrine, so prominent in
the Synoptists is not absent from St. John,-the teaching
as to a later, external and visible, forensic judgment.
And Catherine has a similar intennixture of two currents,
yet with a strong predominance of the immanental, present
conception of the matter.
And even for that one volitional act in the beyond, which,
according to her doctrine, has a certain constitutive importance
for the whole eternity of all still partially impure souls-for
that voluntary plunge-we can find an analogue in the
Johannine writings, although here there is no reference to the
after life. For throughout the greater part of his teaching-
from iii, 15, 16, apparently up to the end of the Gospel,-the
possession of spiritual Life is consequent upon the soul's own
acts of Faith, and not, as one would expect from his other,
more characteristic teaching, upon its Regeneration fron1
above, iii, 3. And the result of such acts of Faith is a
It Metabasis," a upassing over from death to life," v, 24; I John
iii, 14. Catherine will have conceived such an act of Faith as
predominantly an act of Love, and the act as itself already that
1\ietabasis; and will, most characteristically, have quickened
the movement, and have altered its direction from the
horizontal to the vertical, so that the U passing, going over,"
becomes a It plunge down into" Life. For indeed the Fire
she plunges into is, in her doctrine, Life Itself; since it is
Light, Love, Christ, and God.
Catherine, once more, is John's most faithful disciple, where
he declares that Life to stream out immediately from the life-
giving object of Faith into the life-seeking subject of that
Faith, from the believed God into the believing soul: U I am
the Bread of Life: he that cOlneth to Me shall not hunger ";
.
go THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
U he that abideth in Me, and I in him, the same beareth
much fruit" ; vi, 35; xv, 5.
And finally, she follows John closely where he insists upon
Simultaneity and Eternity as contrasted with Succession and
Immortality, so as even to abstract from the bodily resurrec-
tion. He \vho (( hath passed out of death into life" (already)
(( possesses eternal life "; U whosoever liveth and believeth
on Me, shall never die" (at any time); (( this," already and
of itself, (( is life eternal, that they should know Thee, the only
true God, and Him Whom Thou didst send, even Jesus
Christ;" and the soul' s abiding in such an experience is Christ's
own joy, transplanted into it, and a joy which is full, v, 24;
xi, 26; xvii, 3; xv, II. And there is here such an insistence
upon an unbroken spiritual life, in spite of and right through
physical death, that, to 1\Iartha's declaration that her brother
will arise at the last day, xi, 24, Jesus answers, tt I am the
Resurrection and the Life: he that believeth on Me, though
he die" the bodily death, U shall live " on in his soul; indeed
(( every man who liveth" the life of the body, (( and who
believeth in !vIe, shall never die" (at any time) in his
soul, xi, 25, 26. John's other line of thought, in which the
bodily resurrection is prominent, remains without any definite
or systematic response in Catherine's teaching.
(5) We can then summarize the influence exercised by
John upon Catherine by saying that he encouraged her to
conceive religion as an experience of eternity; as a true, living
knowledge of things spiritual; indeed as a direct touch of
man's soul by God Himself, culminating in man's certainty
that God is Love.
III. THE AREOPAGITE WRITINGS.
Catherine's close relations to the Areopagite, the Pseudo-
Dionysius, are of peculiar interest, in their manifold agree-
ment, difference, or non-responsiveness; and this although the
ideas thus assimilated are mostly of lesser depth and in1port-
ance than those derived from the New T estamen t writings
just considered. They can be grouped conveniently under
the subject-matters of God's creative, providential, and restor-
ative, outgoing, His action upon souls and all things extant,
and of the reasons for the different results of this action; of
certain symbols used to characterize that essential action of
SOURCES OF CATHERINE'S CONCEPTIONS 9I
God upon His creatures; of the states and energizings of the
soul, in so far as it is responsive to that action; of certain
terms concerning these reactions of the soul; and of the
final result of the whole process. I shall try and get back,
in most cases, to the Areopagite's Neo-Platonist sources, the
dry, intensely scholastic Proclus, and that great soul, the
prince of the non-Christian Mystics, Plotinus. 1
I. God's general action.
As to God's action, we have in Dionysius the Circle with
the three stages of its movement,-a conception so dear to
Catherine. H Theologians call Him the Esteemed and the
Loved, and again Love and Loving-kindness, as being a
Power at once propulsive and leading up" and back H to
Himself; a loving movement self-moved, which pre-exists in
the Good, and bubbles forth from the Good to things exist-
ing, and which again returns to the Good-as it were a sort
of everlasting circle \vhirling round, because of the Good, from
the Good, in the Good, and to the Good,-ever advancing and
remaining and returning in the same and throughout the
same." This is (( the power of the divine similitude" present
throughout creation, (( which turns all created things to their
cause." 2 The doctrine is derived from Proclus: (( Everything
caused both abides in its cause and proceeds from it and
returns to it "; and (( everything that proceeds from some-
thing returns, by a natural instinct, to that from which it
proceeds." 3 And Plotinus had led the way: (( there" in the
super-sensible world, experienced in n10ments of ecstasy, It in
touch and union with the One, the soul begets Beauty,
Justice and Virtue: and that place and life is, for it, its prin-
ciple and end: principle, since it springs from thence; end,
because the Good is there, and because, once arrived there, the
soul becomes what it was at first." 4
1 I am much indebted to the thorough and convincing monograph of
the Catholic Priest and Professor Dr. Hugo Koch. Pseudo-Dionysius Areo-
pagita in seinen Beziehungen zum Neo-Platonis1n'Us und Mysterienwesen,
Mainz, 1900, for a fuller understanding of the relations between Dionysius,
Proclus, and Plotinus. I have also found much help in H. F. l'.Iüller's
admirable German translation of Plotinus, a translation greatly superior
to Thomas Taylor's English or to Bouillet's French translét.tion. And I
have greatly benefited by the admirable study of Plotinus in Dr. Edward
Caird's Evolution 01 Theology in the Greek PhilosoPhers. 1904, Vol. II.
pp. 210-34 6 .
2 The Divine Names. iii. I; ix, 4: English translation by Parker,
18 97, pp. 49, 50; 106.
3 Institutio Theologica. c. 35; c. 31. t Enneads. vi. ch. ix. 9.
92 THE MYS'fICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
And Dionysius has the doctrine, so dear to Catherine, that
U the Source of Good is indeed present to all, but all are not,"
by their intention, U present to It; yet, by our aptitude for
Divine union, we all," in a sense, (( are present to It." (( It
shines, on Its own part, equally upon all things capable
of participation in It." 1 Already Plotinus had finely said:
(( The One is not far away from anyone, and yet is liable to
be far away from one and all, since, present though It be, It
is " efficaciously (( present only to such as are capable of re-
ceiving It, and are so disposed as to adapt themselves to It
and, as it were, to seize and touch It by their likeness to It,
. . . when, in a word, the soul is in the state in which it was
when it callie from It." 2
We have again in Dionysius the combination, so character-
istic of Catherine, of a tender respect for the substance of
human nature, as good and ever respected by God, and of a
keen sense of the pathetic weakness of man's sense-clogged
spirit here below. U Providence, as befits its goodness, pro-
vides for each being suitably: for to destroy nature is not a
function of Providence." (( All those who cavil at the Divine
Justice, unconsciously commit a manifest injustice. For they
say that immortality ought to be in mortals, and perfection
in the imperfect . . . and perfect power in the weak, and that
the temporal should be eternal . . . in a word, they assign
the properties of one thing to another." 3
2. Syn
bols of God's action.
(I) As to the symbols of God's action, we have first the Chain
or Rope, Catherine's U fune," that U rope of His pure Love," of
which (( an end was thrown to her from hea ven." 4 This
symbol was no doubt suggested by Dionysius : U Let us then
elevate our very selves by our prayers to the higher ascent of
the Divine. . . rays; as though a luminous chain (rope, UEtpa)
were suspended from the celestial heights and reached down
hither, and we, by ever stretching out to it up and up . . .
were thus carried upwards." 5 And this passage again goes
back to Proclus, who describes the (( chain (rope) of love" as
U having its entirely simple and hidden highest point fixed
amongst the veryfirst ranks of the Gods" ; its middle effluence
1 Divine Names, iii, I; ix. 4: Parker. pp. 27. [04.
2 Enneads, vi. ch. ix. 4.
3 Divine Names. viii. 7: Parker. pp. 9 8 . 99.
C Vita, pp. 47c. 4 8a .
i Divine Names. Hi. I: Parker. pp. 27. 28.
SOURCES OF CATHERINE'S CONCEPTIONS 93
U amongst the Gods higher than the (sensible) world " ; and
its third, lowest, part, as U divided multiformly throughout the
(sensible) world." (( The divine Love implants one common
bond (chain) and one indissoluble friendship in and between
each soul (that participates in its power), and between all and
the Beautiful Itself." 1 And this simile of a chain from heaven,
which in Dionysius is luminous, and in Catherine and Proclus
is loving, goes back, across Plato (Theaetetus 153c and Re-
public, X, 6Ib, 99c) to Homer, where it again is luminous
(golden). For, in the Iliad, viii, 17-20, Zeus says to the Gods
in Olympus, (( So as to see all things, do you, 0 Gods and
Goddesses all, hang a golden chain from heaven, and do you
all seize hold of it "-so as thus to descend to earth.
(2) We have next the symbol of the Sun and its purifying,
healing Light, under which God and His action are raptur-
ously proclaimed by Dionysius. (( Even as our sun, by its
very being, enlightens all things able to partake of its light
in their various degrees, so also the Good, by its very exist-
ence, sends unto all things that be, the rays of its entire good-
ness, according to their capacity for them. By means of
these rays they are purified from all corruption and death. . .
and are separated from instability." U The Divine Goodness,
this our great sun, enlightens. . . nourishes, perfects, renews."
Even the pure can thus be made purer still. (( He, the Good,
is called spiritual light . . . he cleanses the mental vision
of the very angels: they taste, as it were, the light." 2 All
this imagery goes back, in the first instance, to Proclus. For
Proclus puts in parallel (( sun" and H God," and (( to be en-
lightened " and (( to be deified " ; makes all purifying forces to
coalesce in the activity of the Sun-God, Apollo Katharsios,
the Purifier, who U everywhere unifies multiplicity. . .
purifying the entire heaven and all living things throughout
the world " ; and describes how U from above, from his super-
heavenly post, Apollo scatters the arrows of Zeus,-his rays
upon all the world." 3 The Sun's rays, here as powerful as
the bolts of Zeus, thus begin to play the part still assigned
to them in Catherine's imagery of the (( Saëtte " and (( Radii "
of the divine Light and Love. And the substance of the
whole symbol goes back, through fine sayings of Plotinus
and through Philo, to Plato, who calls the Sun " the offspring
1 In Platonis Alcibiadem. ii, 78 seq.
I Divine Names, iv. I; iv, 5: Parker. pp. 32. 33; 38.
I In Parmenidem. iv. 34. Iu Cratylum. pp. 103; 107.
.
94 THE MYSTICAL ELE11ENT OF RELIGION
of the Good and analogous to it," and who (doubtless rightly)
takes Homer's (( golden chain" to be nothing but the Sun..
rays,-thus identifying the two symbols.!
(3) Fire, as a symbol for God and His action, is thus praised
by Dionysius: U The sacred theologians often describe the
super-essential Essence in terms of Fire . . . For sensible
fire is, so to say, present in all things, and pervades them aU
without mingling with them, and is received by all things;
. . . it is intolerable yet invisible; it masters all things by its
own might, and yet it but brings the things in which it resides
to (the development of) their o\vn energy; it has a transform-
ing po\ver; it communicates itself to all who approach it in
any degree; . . . it has the power of dividing (what it seizes) ;
it bears upwards; it is penetrating; . . . it increases its own
self in a hidden manner; it suddenly shines forth." 2-All
these qualities, and the delicate transitions from fire to light
and from light back to fire, and from heat immanent to heat
applied from without, we can find again, vividly assimilated
and experienced, in Catherine's teaching and emotional life.
But the Sun-light predominates in Dionysius, the Fire-heat
in Catherine; and whereas the former explicitly attaches
purification only to the Sun-light, the latter connects the
cleansing chiefly with Fire-heat, no doubt because the Greek
man is busy chiefly with the intellectually cognitive, and the
I talian woman with the morally ameliorative, activities and
interests of the mind and soul.
3. The soul's reaction.
(I) As to the soul's reaction under God's action, and its return
to Hif\1, we first get, in Dionysius, the insistence upon Mystical
Quietude and Silence, which, according to him, are strictly
necessary, since only like can know and become one with
like, and God is (( Peace and Repose" and, H as compared
with every known progression, Immobility," and (( the one
all-perfect source and cause of the Peace of all " ; and He is
Silence, U the Angels are, as it were, the heralds of the Divine
Silence,"-teaching not unlike that of St. Ignatius of Antioch,
(( Jesus Christ . . . the Word which proceeds from Silence." 3
Hence (( in proportion as we ascend to the higher designations
of God, do our expressions become more and more circum-
scribed"; and at last (( we shall find, not a little speaking,
1 Republic. VI, 508c. Theaetetus, 153c.
I Heavenly Hierarchy. xv. 2: Parker. pp. 56, 57.
I Divine Names, xi. I; iv. 2: Parker. pp. 113, 34. Ad Magnesios. viii. 2.
SOURCES OF CATHERINE'S CONCEPTIONS 9S
but a complete absence of speech and of conception." 1 As
Proclus has it : U Let this Fountain of Godhead be honoured
on our part by silence and by the union which is above
silence." 2 And Plotinus says: U This," the Divine, (( Light
comes not from anywhere nor disappears any whither, but
simply shines or shines not: hence we must not pursue after
it, but must abide in quietness till it appears." And when it
does appear, (( the contemplative, as one rapt and divinely
inspired, abides here with quietude in a motionless condition,
. . . being entirely stable, and becoming, as it were, stability
itself." 3-All this still finds its echo in Catherine.-But the
treble (cognitive) movement of the Angelic and human
mind,-the circular, the straight-line, and the spiral,-which
Dionysius, in direct imitation of Proclus, carefully develops
throughout three sections, is quite absent from Catherine's
mind. 4o
(2) We next get, in Dionysius, the following teachings as
to Mystical Vision and Union. (( The Unity-above-Mind is
placed above the minds; and the Good-above-word is un-
utterable by word." (( There is, further, the most divine
knowledge of Almighty God, which is known through not
knowing. . . when the mind, having stood apart from all
existing things, and having then also dismissed itself, has been
made one with the super-luminous rays." (( We must contem-
plate things divine by our whole selves standing out of our
whole sel ves, and becoming wholly of God." (( By the resistless
and absolute ecstasy, in all purity, from out of thyself and all
things, thou wilt be carried on high, to the super-essential ray
of the divine darkness." (( It is during the cessation of every
mental energizing, that such a union of the deified minds and
of the super-divine light takes place." 5 And the original
cause and final effect of such a going forth from self, are
indicated in words which were worked out in a vivid
fulness by Catherine's whole convert life: (( Divine Love is
ecstatic, not permitting any lovers to belong to themselves,
but only to those beloved by them. And this love, the
1 Mystic Theology. iii: Parker, p. 135.
a Platonic Theology, III, p. 13 2 .
3 Enneads, v, ch. v. 8; vi, ch. ix, I I.
( Divine Names, iv. 8-10: Parker. pp. 42-45. In Parmenidem, vi, 52
(see Koch, p. 152).
6 Divine Names. i. I: vii. 3; vii. I; Mystic Theology. I; Divine Names.
vii. 3: Parker. pp. 2; 91. 92; 87; 130; 91. 92.
96 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
superior beings show by being full of forethought for their
inferiors; those equal in rank, by their mutual coherence;
and the inferior by a looking back and up to the superior
ones." 1
Dionysius here everywhere follows Proclus. Yet the
noblest Neo-Platonist sayings are again furnished by Plotinus:
H \Ve are not cut off or severed from the Light, but we breathe
and consist in It, since It ever enlightens and bears us, as long
as It is what It is." In the moments of Union, (t we are able
to see both Him and ourself,-ourself in dazzling splendouf,
full of spiritual light, or rather one with the pure Light
Itself . . . our life's flame is then enkindled." U There the
soul rests, after it has fled up, away from evil, to the place
which is free from evils . . . and the true life is there."
U Arrived there, the soul becomes that which she was at firsL" 2
And if Plotinus has thus already got the symbolism of place,
he is as fully aware as Catherine herself that, for purposes of
vivid presentation, he is spatializing spiritual, that is, un-
extended, qualitative states and realities. (t Things incor-
poreal do not get excluded by bodies; they are severed only
by otherness and difference: hence, when such otherness
is absent, they, not differing, are near each other." And
already, as with Catherine, there is the apparent finality, and
yet also the renewed search for more. U The seer and the seen
have become one, as though it were a case not of vision but
of union." U When he shall have crossed over as the image to
its Archetype, then he will have reached his journey's end."
And yet this U ecstasy, simplification, and donation of one's
self," this" quiet," is still also (t a striving after contact," (t a
musing to achieve union." 3
4. Ter11zillology of the soul's reaction.
(I) Certain terms and conceptions in connection with the
soul's return to God, which are specially dear to Catherine,
already appear, fully developed, in Dionysius, Proclus, and
Plotinus; in part, even in Plato. Her U suddenly II (sub21o)
appears but rarely in Dionysius, e. g. in H eavellly Hierarchy
xv, 2; but it is carefully eXplained by him in his Third
Epistle, specially devoted to the subject. 4 It is common in
Plotinus: "Suddenly the soul saw, without seeing how it saw" ;
Usuddenly thou shalt receive light," (t suddenly shining." 5 And
1 Divine Names, iv. 13: Parker. p. 48. Z Enneads. vi, ch. ix. 9.
8 Ibid. vi, ch. ix, 8; ch. vi, I I. ( Parker. p. 142.
i Enneads, vi. ch. vii. 36; v. ch. iii. 17; v. ch. v. 7.
SOURGES OF CATHERINE'S CONGEPTIONS 97
in Plato we find: U He who has learnt to see the Beautiful in
due order and succession, when he comes towards the end, will
suddenly perceive aN ature of wondrous beauty-Beauty alone,
absolute, separate, simple and everlasting" : a passage which
derives its imagery from the Epopteia of the Eleusynian
Mysteries,-the sudden appearance, the curtain being with-
drawn, upon the stage whereon the Heathen Mystery-play
was being performed, under a peculiar fairy-illumination, of
the figures of Demeter, Kore, and Iacchus, as the culmination
of a long succession of purifications and initiations.!
Catherine's U wound," or U wounding stroke," ([erita), is, in
part, the necessary consequence of the U arrow" conception
already considered; in part, the echo of that group of terms
which, in Dionysius and Proclus even more than in Plotinus,
express the painfully sudden and overwhelming, free-grace
character of God's action upon the soul,-especially of È7TtßO^
,
(( immissio," a U coming-upon," a U hitting," a very common
word in the Areopagite; jlE'roX1} , U communication," and
7rapaðOX1], (( reception," being the corresponding terms for God's
and the soul's share in this encounter respectively. Thus:
(( Unions, whether we call them immissions or receptions from
God." 2
uPresence," upresenza," 7rapavG'tá, is another favourite term,
as with Catherine so also with Dionysius and Proclus. Thus
the Areopagite: (( The presence of the spiritual light causes
recollection and unity in those that are being enlightened with
it," U His wholly inconceivable presence." 3 And Proclus:
U Every perfect spiritual contact and communion is owing to
the presence of God." 4 And the conception of a sudden
presence goes back, among the Neo-Platonists, to Plato and
the Greek Mysteries, in which the God was held suddenly to
arrive and to take part in the sacred dance. Such rings of
sacred dancers, (( choirs," are still characteristic of Dion ysius-
e.g. Heavenly Hierarchy, vii, 4-but they are quite wanting
in Catherine.-But U contact," (( touch" È7racþ
,-said of God's
direct action upon the soul,-a conception so intensely active
in Catherine's mind and life, is again a favourite term with
Dionysius and Proclus. The former declares this (( touch" to
1 Symposium. 210 E. See the admirable elucidations in Rhode.s Psyche.
ed. 1898. Vol. I, p. 298; Vol. II. pp. 279; 283. 284.
I Divine Names. i, 5: Parker. p. 8.
a Divine Names. iv. 6; Mystic Theology. i J ill; Parker. pp. 39, 132.
, In Alcibiadem. ii. 302.
VOL. II. H
98 THE MYSTIGAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
be neither U sensible II nor U intelligible," and that U we are
brought into contact with things unutterable"; the latter talks
of U perfect spiritual contact." 1
The symbols of uN akedness" and U Garments," as indicative
respectively of the soul's purity and impurity or self-delusion,
are, though most prominent in Catherine, rare in Dionysius.
But his declaration: (( The nakedness of the (Angels') feet
indicates purification from the addition of all things external,
and assimilation to the divine simplicity" exactly expresses
her idea. 2 And Proclus has it more fully: The soul, on
descending into the body, forsakes unity, U and around her,
from all sides, there grow multiform kinds of existence
and manifold garments"; (( love of honour is the last garment
of souls"; and" when," in mounting up, U we lay aside our
passions and garments which, in coming down, we had put
on, we must also strip off that last garment, in order that,
having becolne (entirely) naked, we may establish ourselves
before God, having made ourselves like to the divine life." 3
(2) Again, as to Triads, it is interesting to note that Catherine
has nothing about the three stages or ways of the inner life,
-purgative, illuminative, unitive,-of which Dionysius is full,
and which are already indicated in Proclus; for we can find
but two in her life, the purgative and unitive, and in her teaching
these two alone appear, mostly in close combination, some-
times in strong contrast. Nor has she anything about the
three degrees or kinds of prayer,-Meditation, Contemplation,
Union,-as indicated in Dionysius: (( It behoves us, by our
prayers, to be lifted into proximity with the Divine Trinity;
and then, by still further approaching it, to be initiated . . .;
and (lastly) to make ourselves one with it"; and as taught by
Proclus: U Knowledge leads, then follows proximity, and then
union." 4 With her we only get Contemplation and Union.-
Nor do we get in her anything about thrice three choirs of
Angels, or three orders of Christian Ministrants, or three
classes of Christian people, or thrice three groups of Sacra-
ments and Sacramental acts. For she is too intensely bent
upon immediate intercourse with God, and too much absorbed
in the sense of profound unity and again of innunlerable
1 Mystic Theology, iv, v; Divine Names. i. I: Parker. pp. 13 6 . 137;
I; In Alcibiadem, ii, 302.
2 Heavenly Hierarchy, ch. xv. s. 3: Parker. p. 60.
S In Alcibiadem, iii, 75.
t Divine Names. iii. I: Parker, pp. 27. 28. In Parmen'l'dem. iv. 68.
SOURGES OF CATHERINE'S CONCEPTIONS 99
multiplicity, to be attracted by Dionysius's Neo-Platonist
ladder of carefully graduated intermediaries, or by his con-
tinuous interest in triads of every kind. Catherine thus
follows the current in Dionysius which insists upon dir
ct
contact between the soul and the transcendent God, and
ignores the other, which bridges over the abyss between the
two by carefully graduated intermediaries: these inter-
mediaries having become, with her, successive stages of
purification and of ever more penetrating union of the one
soul with the one God.
5. Deification, especially through the Eucharist.
As to the end of the whole process, we find that
Deification, so frequently implied or suggested by Catherine,
is formally taught by Dionysius: "A union of the deified
minds" (l./(()Eov}livwv); the heavenly and the earthly Hierachy
have the power and task" to communicate to their subjects,
according to the dignity of each, the sacred deification"
(È./(OÉW(J'lt:;); "we are led up, by means of the multiform of
sensible symbols, to the uniform Deification." 1 "The One
is the very God," says Proclus, " but the Mind (the Noûs) is
the divinest of beings, and the soul is divine, and the body is
godlike. . . . And every body that is God-like is so through
the soul having become divine; and every soul that is divine,
is so through the Mind being very divine; and every Mind
that is thus very divine, is so through participation in the
Divine One." 2 There are preformations of this doctrine in
Plotinus and echoes of it throughout Catherine's sayings.
And the Areopagite's teaching that the chief means and
the culmination of this deification are found and reached in
the reception of the Holy Eucharist will no doubt also have
stimulated Catherine's mind: "The Communicant is led to
the summit of deiformation, as far as this is possible for him." 3
And her soul responds completely to the beautiful Dionysian-
Proclian teaching concerning God's presence in all things, as
the cause of the profound sympathy which binds them all
together. "'fhey say," declares Dionysius, "that He is in
minds . . . and in bodies, and in heaven and in earth; (indeed
that He is) sun, fire, water, spirit . . . all things exist-
ing, and yet again not one of all things existing." " The
1 Divine Names. i, 5; Ecclesiastical Hierarchy. i. 2; Divine Names.
ix, 5; Parker, pp. 8, 69. 104.
I Institutio Theologica. c. 1 2 9.
8 Ecclesiastical Hierarchy. ill. 3. 7; Parker. p. 97.
100 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
distribution of boundless power passes from Almighty God to
all things, and no single being but has intellectual, or rational,
or sensible, or vital, or essential power." "The gifts of the
unfailing Power pass on to men and (lesser) living creatures,
to plants, and to the entire nature of the Universe." 1 This
latter passage was suggested by Proclus: "One would say
that, through participation in the One, all things are deified,
each according to its rank, inclusive of the very lowest of
beings." "The image of the One and the inter-communion
existing through it,-this it is that produces the extant
sympathy" which permeates all things. 2 -But Catherine has
nowhere the term" echo," which is so dear to Dionysius: "His
all-surpassing power holds together and preserves even the
remotest of its echoes"; "the sun and plants are or hold most
distant echoes of the Good and of Life"; indeed even the
licentious man still possesses, in his very passion, "as it were a
faint echo of Union and of Friendship." 3
6. Dionysius and Catherine
. three agreements and differ-
ences.
I conclude with three important points of difference and
similarity between Catherine and Dionysius.
(1) Catherine abstains from the use of those repulsive,
impossibly hyperbolic epithets such as "the Super-Good," " the
Above-Mind," which Dionysius is never weary of applying to
God, and is content with ever feeling and declaring how high
above the very best conception which she can form of mind
and of goodness He undoubtedly is; thus wisely moderated,
I take it, by her constant experience and faith as to God's
immediate presence \vithin the human soul, which soul
cannot, consequently, be presented as entirely remote from
the nature of God.
(2) Catherine transforms over-intense and impoverishing
insistence upon the pure Oneness of God, such as we find it
even in Dionysius and still more in Proclus, into a, some-
times equally over-intense, conception as to the oneness of
our union with Him, leaving Him to be still conceived as an
overflowing richness of all kinds.
(3) And Catherine keeps, in an interesting manner, the
Hellenic, and specifically Platonic, formulation for the deepest
of her experiences and teachings, since her standing designation
1 Divine Names. i. 6; viii. 3; 5: Parker. pp. 10. 95. 96.
· In Parmenidem. iv. 34; v.
I Divine Names, viii, 2; iv. 4; iv. 20; Parker. pp. 95. 84. 57.
SOURCES OF GATHERINE'S CONCEPTIONS IOI
of God and of Our Lord is never personal, "My Lover" or" My
Friend"; but, as it were, elemental, " Love" or"
iy Love."
Her keen self-purifying instinct and reverence for God will
have spontaneously inclined her thus to consider Him first
as an Ocean of Being in which to quench and drown her small,
clamorous individuality, and this as a necessary step towards
reconstituting that true personality, which.. itself spirit,
would be penetrated and sustained by the Spirit, Christ,
God. And then the Pauline-J ohannine picturings of God as a
quasi-place and extended substance (" from Him and in Him
and to Him," "in the Spirit," "in Christ," "God is Charity and
he that abideth in Charity, abideth in Him") will have
strongly confirmed this trend. Yet Dionysius too must
have greatly helped on this movement of her mind. For in
Dionysius the standing appellations for God are, in true Neo-
Platonist fashion, derived from extended or diffusive material
substances or conditions, Light, Fire, Fountain, Ocean;
and from that pervasive emotion, Love, strictly speaking
Desire, Eros.
Now this, for our modem and Christian feeling, curiously
impersonal, general and abstract method goes back, through
Proclus and Plotinus, to Plato, who, above all in his
Symposiu1n, is dominated by the two tendencies and
requirements, of identifying the First and Perfect with the
most General and the most Abstract; and of making the very
pre-requisites and instruments of the search for It,-even the
earthly Eros, still so far from the Heavenly Eros and from
the Christian Agapë,-into occasions, effects or instalments of
and for the great Reality sought by them. And since it is
thus the love, the desire, the eros, of things beautiful, and
true, and good,-a love first sensible, then intellectual, and
at last spiritual, which makes us seek and find It, the Beauty,
Truth, and Goodness \vhich is First Cause and Final End of
the whole series, this Cause and End will be considered not
as a Lover but as Love Itself. It is plain, I think, that it is
specially this second motive, this requirement of a pervading
organization and circle of and wi thin the life of spirits and of
the Spirit, which has also determined Catherine to retain
PIa to's terminology.
102 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
IV. ]ACOPONE DA TODI'S "LODE."
In the case of ]acopone, the suddenly wife-bereft and
converted lawyer, an ardent poet doubled by a soaring, daring
mystic, with an astonishing richness of simultaneous symbols
and conceptions and rapidity of successive complements and
contrasts, it will really be simplest if I take the chief touches
which have characteristically stimulated Catherine or have left
her unaffected, in the order and grouping in which they appear
in his chief" Lode," as these latter are given in the first printed
edition, probably the very one used by Catherine.!
I. Lode XIII, XXIII, XXXV, XLV.
In Loda XIII "the vicious soul is likened unto Hell,"
vv. 1-7; and " the soul that yesterda y was Hell, to-day has
turned into Heaven," v. 8. \Ve thus get here, precisely as
in Catherine, the spaceless conditions of the soul and their
modifications treated under the symbols of places and of the
spatial change from one place to the other.
In Loda XXIII we first have five successive purifications
and purities of Love, " carnal, counterfeit, self-seeking, natural,
spiritual, transformed," vv. 1-6; and then the symbols of
spatial location and movement reappear, " if height does not
abase itself, it cannot participate with, nor communicate itself
to, the lowest grade"; all which is frequent with Catherine
But she nowhere echoes the teaching reproduced here, v. 10,
as to the Divine Trinity being figured in man's three faculties
of soul.
Loda XXXV gives us a sort of Christian Stoicism very
dear to Catherine: "Thou, my soul, hast been created In great
elevation; thy nature is grounded in great nobility (gentilezza),"
v. 7; H thou hast not thy life in created things; it is necessary
for thee to breathe in other countries, to mount up to God,
thine inheritance, 'Vho (alone) can satisfy thy poverty,"
v. 10; "great is the honour which thou doest to God, when
thou abidest (stare) in Him, in thy (true) nobility," v. II.
1 Laude de 10 contemPlativo et extatico B. F. J acopone de 10 Ordine
de 10 SeraPhico S. Francesco.... In Firenze, per Ser Francesco
Bonaccorsi. MCCCCLXXXX. Only the sheets are numbered; and two
Lode have, by mistake. been both numbered LVIII: I have indicated
them by LVIlla and LVIIlb respectively. I have much felt the
absence of any monograph on the sources and characters of ]acopone's
doctrine.
SOURCES OF CATHERINE'S CONCEPTIONS 10 3
Loda XLV gives" the Five Modes in which God appears
in the Soul "-" the state of fear" ; curative, "healing-love" ;
" the way of love"; "the paternal mode"; "the mode of
espousals." Catherine leaves the last two, anthropomorphic
and familial, conceptions quite unused, and passes in her life,
at one bound, from the first to the third mode.
2. Lode L VIlla, L Vlllb.
The fine Loda L VIlla, " Of Holy Poverty, Mistress of all
Things," has evidently suggested much to Catherine.
" Waters, rivers, Jakes, and ocean, fish within them and their
swimming; airs, winds, birds, and all their flying: all these
turn to jewels for me," v. 10. How readily the sense of water,
and of rapid movement within it, passes here into that of
air, and of swift locomotion within it! And both these
movements are felt to represent, in vivid fashion, certain
very different experiences of the soul.-" Moon, Sun, Sky, and
Stars,-even these are not amongst my treasures: above the
very sky those things abide, which are the object of my song,"
v. II. The positive, "analogic" method has here turned
suddenly into the negative, " apophatic " one; and yet, even
here, we still have the spatial symbolism, for the best is the
highest up,-indeed it is this very symbolism which is made
to add point to the negative declaration, a declaration which
nevertheless clearly implies the mere symbolism of that
spatialization. All this is fully absorbed by Catherine.-
" Since God has my will, . . . my wings have such feathers
that from earth to heaven there is no distance for me," v. 12.
Here we see how Plato filters through, complete, to J acopone ;
but only in his central idea to Catherine. For the Phaedrus,
246b, c, teaches: "The perfect soul then, having become
winged, soars upwards, and is the ruler of the universe; whilst
the imperfect soul sheds her feathers and is borne downwards,
till it settles on the solid ground." Catherine never mentions
wings nor feathers, but often dwells upon flying.
The great Loda LVIIIb, " Of Holy Poverty and its Treble
Heaven," (one passage of which is formally quoted and care-
fully expounded by Catherine), is a combination of Platonism,
Paulinism, and Franciscanism, and has specially influenced
her through its Platonist element. Verses 1-9 contain a
fine apostrophe to Poverty. "0 Love of Poverty, Reign of
tranquillity! Poverty, high Wisdom! to be subject to
nothing; through despising to possess all things created ! "
v. 1: all this is echoed by Catherine. But the ex-lawyer's
.
I04 THE :rvIYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
declaration that such a soul" has neither judge nor notary,"
v. 3, did certainly not determine her literally, for we have
had before us some fifteen cases in which she had recourse to
lawyers. "God makes not His abode in a narrow heart;
thou art, oh man, precisely as great as thine affection may be.
The spirit of poverty possesses so ample a bosonl, that Deity
Itself takes up its dwelling there," v. 8. Catherine's deepest
self seenlS to breathe from out of this profound saying.
Verses 10 to 30 describe the three heavens of successive
self-despoilments. The firmamental heaven, which typifies
the four-fold renouncement,-of honour, riches, science, repu-
tation of sanctity, has left no echo in Catherine. The stellar
heaven is" composed of solidified clear waters (aquc solidate) " ;
here" the four winds" cease" that move the sea,-that per-
turb the mind: fear and hope, grief and joy," II-I4. Here
Plato again touches Catherine through ]acopone. For the
Symposium, I97a, declares: "Love it is that produces peace
among men and calm on the sea, a cessation of the winds,
and repose and sleep even in trouble"; and ]acopone identi-
fies the nliddle " crystalline " heaven, (" the waters above" of
Genesis, chap. i,) with Plato's" sea" ; takes Plato's (four) winds
as the soul's chief passions; and considers Plato's" peace"
and "windlessness" as equivalent to the" much silence,"
which, says the Apocalypse, " arose in heaven," viü, I, inter-
preted here as " in n1id-heaven." "Not to fear Hell, nor to
hope for Heaven, to rejoice in no good, to grieve over no
adversity," v. 16, is a formulation unlike Catherine, although
single sayings of hers stand for sentiments analogous to the
first and last.-" If the virtues are naked, and the vices are
not garmented,-mortal wounds get given to the soul," v. 19,
has a symbolisnl exactly opposite to Catherine's, who, we
know, loves to glorify" nakedness" as the soul's purity.-
" The highest heaven " is " beyond even the imagings of the
mortihed fancy"; "of every good it has despoiled thee, and
has expropriated thee from all virtue: lay up as a treasure
this thy gain,-the sense of thine own vileness." "0 purified
Love! it alone lives in the tnlth!" These verses, 20-22, have
left a deep impress upon Catherine, although she wisely does
not press that" expropriation from virtue," which goes back
at least to Plotinus, for whom the true Ecstatic is " beyond the
choir of the virtues. J J 1
1. Enneads, vi, ch. ix" I I...
SOURCES OF CATHERINE'S CONCEPTIONS IOS
"That which appears to thee (as extant), is not truly
existent: so high (above) is that which truly is. True ele-
vation of soul (la superbia) dwells in heaven above, and
baseness of mind (hutnilitade) leads to damnation," v. 24, is a
saying to which we still have Catherine's detailed commentary.
In its markedly Platonic distinction between an upper true
and a lower seeming world, and in its characteristically
mystical love of paradox and a play upon words, it is more
curious than abidingly important; but in its deeply Christian
consciousness of " pride" and" humility," in their ordinary
ethical sense, being respectively the subtlest vice and the
noblest virtue, it rises sheer above aU Platonist and Neo-
Platonist apprehension.
" Love abides in prison, in that darksome light! All light
there is darkness, and all darkness there is as the day," vv.
26, 27. Here Catherine no doubt found aids towards her
prison-conception,-of the loving soul imprisoned in the
earthly body, and of the imperfect, yet loving, disembodied
souls imprisoned in Purgatory; and towards articulating her
strong sense of the change in the meaning and value of the
same symbols, as the soul grows in depth and experience. But
her symbolization of God, and of our apprehension of Him as
Light and Fire, is too solidly established in her mind, to allow
her to emphasize the darkness-symbol with any reference to
Hin1.
" There where Christ is enclosed (in the soul), all the old
is changed by Him,-the one is transformed into the Other,
in a Inarvellous union. 'fo live as I and yet not I; and my
very being to be not mine: this is so great a cross-purpose
(traversio), that I know not how to define it," vv. 28-30. This
vivid description, based of course upon St. Paul, of the
apparent shifting of the very centre of the soul's personality,
has left clear echoes in Catherine's sayings; but the explicit
reference to Christ is here as characteristically Franciscan as
it is unlike Catherine's special habits.-And the great poem
ends with a refrain of its opening apostrophe.
3. Lode LXXIV, LXXIX, LXXXI, LXXXIII.
In the dramatically vivid Dialogue between the Old and
the Young Friar" Concerning the divers manners of contem-
plating the Cross," Loda LXXIV, the elder says to the
younger man: "And I find the Cross full of arrows, which
issue from its side: they get fixed in my heart. The Archer
106 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
has aimed them at me; He causes me to be pierced," v. 6.
The Cross is here a bow; and yet the arrows evidently issue
not from it, but, as so many rays, from the Sun, the Light-
Christ, Who is laid upon it,-from the heart of the Crucified.
Catherine maintains the rays and arrows, and the Sun and
Fire from which they issue; but the Cross and the Crucified,
presupposed here throughout, appear not, even to this extent,
in her post-conversion picturings.-" You abide by the
warmth, but I abide within the fire; to you it is delight, but
I am burning through and through, I cannot find a place of
refuge in this furnace," v. 13. All this has been echoed
throughout by Catherine.
Loda LXXIX, " Of the Divine Love and its Praises," has
evidently much influenced her. "0 joyous wound, delightful
wound, gladsome wound, for him who is wounded by Thee,
o Love!" "0 Love, divine Fire! Love full of laughter and
playfulness!" "0 Love, sweet and suave; 0 Love, Thou
art the key of heaven! Ship that Thou art, bring me to port
and calm the tempest," vv. 3, 6, 16. All this we have found
reproduced in her similes and experiences. " Love, bounteous
in spending Thyself ; Love with wide-spread tables!" "Love,
Thou art the One that loves, and the Means wherewith the
heart loves Thee! " vv. 24, 26. These verses give us the
wide, wide world outlook, the connection between Love and
the Holy Eucharist, and the identity of the Subject, Means,
and Object of Love, which are all so much dwelt upon by
Catherine.
Loda LXXXI is interesting by the way in which, although
treating of" the love of Christ upon the Cross," it everywhere
apostrophizes Love and not the Lover, and treats the former,
again like Catherine, as a kind of boundless living substance;
indeed v. 17 must have helped to suggest one of her favourite
conceptions: "0 great Love, greater than the great sea! Oh !
the man who is drowned within it, under it, and with it all
around him, \vhilst he knows not where he is ! "
Loda LXXXIII has two touches dear to Catherine. "0
Love, whose name is ' I love '-the plural is never found," v. 5,
-a saying which evidently is directed, not against a social
conception of religion, but against a denial of the Divine Love
being Source as well as Obj ect of our love; and " I did not
love Thee with any gain to myself, until I loved Thee for
Thine own sake," v. 15,-a declaration of wondrous depth
and simplicity.
SOURCES OF CATHERINE'S CONCEPTIONS I07
4. Lode LXXXVIII, LXXXIX, LXXXX, LXXXXVIII,
LXXXXIX.
The great Loda LXXXVIII, " How the soul complains to
God concerning the excessive ardours of the love infused into
it," contains numerous touches which have been interestingly
responded to or ignored by Catherine. "All my will is on
fire with Love, is united, transformed (into It); who can bear
such Love ? Nor fire nor sword can part the loving soul and
her Love; a thing so united cannot be divided; neither
suffering nor death can henceforth mount up to that height
where the soul abides in ecstasy," vv. 5, 6: a conlbination
of St. Paul and Plotinus, quite after Catherine's heart. But
" the light of the sun appears to me obscure, now that I
see that resplendent Countenance," v. 7, has an anthropomor-
phic touch to which she does not respond; and" I have
given all my heart, that it may possess that Lover who
renews me so,-O Beauty ancient and ever new! " v. la, has
the personal designation H Lover," which, again, is alien to her
vocabulary .
" Seeing such Beauty, I have been drawn out of myself . . .
and the heart now gets undone, melted as though it were wax,
and finds itself again, with the likeness of Christ upon it,"
v. II, must have stimulated, by its first part, some of her own
experiences, and will, by its second part, taken literally, have
helped on the fantastic expectations of her attendants. " Love
rises to such ardour, that the heart seems to be transfixed as
with a knife," v. 14, no doubt both expressed an experience of
]acopone and helped to constitute the form of a similar
experience on the part of Catherine. "As iron, which is all
on fire, as dawn, made resplendent by the sun, lose their own
form (nature) and exist in another, so is it with the pure
mind, when clothed by Thee, 0 Love," v. 21, contains ideas,
(all but the symbol of clothing), very dear to Catherine. But
the astonishingly daring words: "Since my soul has been
transfonned into Truth, into Thee, 0 Christ alone, into Thee
'Vho art tender Loving,-not to myself but to Thee can be
imputed \vhat I do. Hence, if I please Thee not, Thou dost
not please Thine Own Self, 0 Love! " v. 22, remain unechoed
by her, no doubt because her states shift from one to another,
and she wisely abstains from pushing the articulation of any
one of them to its own separate logical limit.
" Thou wast born into the world by love and not by flesh,
o Love become Man (hul1lanato Amore)," v. 27, is like her in
IoB THE MYSTIGAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
its interesting persistence in the" Love" (not" Lover ") desig-
nation, but is unlike her in its definite reference to the historic
Incarnation. "Love, 0 Love, Jesus, I have reached the
haven," v. 32, is closely like her, all but the explicit mention
of the historic name; and" Love, 0 Love, Thou art the full-
orbed circle," " Thou art both warp and woof," beginning and
end, material and transforming agency, v. 33, is Catherine's
central idea, expressed in a form much calculated to impress
it upon her.
The daring and profound Loda LXXXIX, " How the soul,
by holy self-annihilation and love, reaches an unknowable
and indescribable state," contains again numerous touches
which have been assimilated by Catherine. So with: "Drawn
forth, out of her natural state, into that unmeasurable condition
whither love goes to drown itself, the soul, having plunged
into the abyss of this ocean, henceforth cannot find, on any
side, any means of issuing forth from it," vv. 12, 13. So also
with: "Since thou dost no longer love thyself, but alone that
Goodness . . . it has become necessary for thee again to love
thyself, but with His Love,-into so great an unity hast thou
been drawn by Him," vv. 52-54. So too with: "All Faith
ceases for the soul to whom it has been given to see; and all
Hope, since it now actually holds what it used to seek," v. 70,
although this is more absolute than are her similar utterances.
-But especially are the startling words interesting: "In
this transformation, thou drinkest Another, and that Other
drinketh thee (tll bevi e sei bevuto, in transformazione}," v. 98,
which, in their second part, are identical with R. Browning's
" My end, to slake Thy thirst" : 1 for they will have helped to
support or to encourage Catherine's corresponding inversion-
the teaching of an eating, an assin1ilation, not of God by man,
but of man by God. Both sets of images go back, of course,
to the Eucharistic reception by the soul of the God-man Christ,
under the forms of Bread eaten and of Wine drunk.
The striking Loda LXXXX, " How the soul arrives at a
treble state of annihilation," has doubtless suggested much to
Catherine. "He who has become the very Cause of all
things" (chi è cosa d' ogni cosa) " can never more desire any-
thing," v. 4, is, it is true, more daring, because more quietly
explicit, than any saying of hers. But v. 13 has been echoed
by her throughout: "The heavens have grown stagnant; their
1 Rabbi Ben Ezra. XXX!.
SOURGES OF GATHERINE'S CONCEPTIONS 109
silence constrains me to cry aloud: t 0 profound Ocean, the
very depth of Thine Abyss has constrained me to attempt and
drown myself within it,' "-where note the interestingly antique
presupposition of the music of the spheres, which has now
stopped, and of the watery constitution of the crystalline
heaven, which allows of stagnation; and the rapidity of the
change in the impressions,-from immobility to silence, and
from air to water. Indeed that Ocean is one as much of air
as of water, and as little the one as the other; and its attractive
force is still that innate affinity between the river-soul and its
living Source and Home, the Ocean God, which we have so
constantly found in Plotinus, Proclus, and Dionysius. II The
land of promise is, for such a soul, no longer one of promise
only: for the perfect soul already reigns within that land.
Men can thus transform themselves, in any and every place,"
v. 18, has, in its touching and lofty Stoic-Christian teaching,
found the noblest response and re-utterance in and by
Catherine's words and life.
Loda LXXXXVIII, II Of the Incarnation of the Divine
Word," full though it is of beautiful Franciscanism, has left
her uninfluenced. But the fine Loda LXXXXIX, II How true
Love is not idle," contains touches which have sunk deep
into her mind. II Splendour that givest to all the world its
light, 0 Love Jesus. . . heaven and earth are by Thee;
Thine action resplends in all things and all things turn to
Thee. Only the sinner despises Thy Love and severs himself
from Thee, his Creator," v. 6, is, in its substance, taken over
by her. "0 ye cold sinners! " v. 12, is her favourite epithet.
And vv. 13, 14, with their rapid ringing of the changes on the
different sense-perceptions, will, by their shifting vividness,
have helped on a similar iridescence in her own imagery: "0
Odour, that transcendest every sweetness! 0 living river of
Delight. . . that causest the very dead to return to their
vigour! In heaven Thy lovers possess Thine immense Sweet-
ness, tasting there those savoury morsels."
And finally Loda LXXXVII, tI Of true and false discretion,"
which, in vv. 12-20, consists of a dialogue between II the Flesh"
and II the Reason," will have helped to suggest the slight
beginnings of this form of apprehension to Catherine which
we have found amongst her authentic sayings and experiences,
and which were, later on, developed on so large a scale, by
Battista V ernazza, throughout her long Dialogo delta Beata
Caterina.
11(' TI-IE 'I\YSTICAL ELE
IENT OF RELIGION
-. Jacoponc it is, then, \vho furnished Catherine with much
ht'lp to\\ ..lrds that rare combination of deep feeling with
severelv abstrJ.ct thinking- \vhich, if at times it somewhat
str.1Ìns.;.md \Vèarics us modems \vho \yould ever end with the
conc.ft"\te, giyes a nobly virile, bracing note to even the most
ffccti\-e of her sa)ings.
,... POIXTS CO)nIO
TO ALL FIVE MINDS; AND CATHE-
RIXE'S
L-\IX DIFFEREKCE FROM HER FOUR PRE-
DECESSORS.
If ,,-e no\y consider for a moment the general points
common to the four \\TIters just considered and to Catherine,
\\'"e readily note that all fi ve are profoundly reflective and
in terpreta ti ye in their a tti tude to\vards the given contingencies
of traditional religion; that they all tend to find the Then
and There of History still at \vork, in various degrees, Here
and XO\V, throughout Time and Space, and in the last resort,
aboye and behind both these categories, in a spaceless, time-
less Present. And if only three, Paul! ]acopone, and Cathe-
rille, bear marks, throughout all they think and feel and do
and are, of the cataclysmic conversion-crisis through ,"-hich
they had passed,-the temporally intermediate two, John and
Dionysius, have also got, but in a more indirect form, much
of a similar Dualism. All five are, in these and other respects,
indefinitely closer to each other than anyone of them is to
the still richer, more complete, and more entirely balanced
though less articulated, Synoptic teaching, which enfolds all
that is abiding in those other five, whilst they, even if united,
do not approximately exhaust the substance of that teaching.
And if \ve \vould briefly define the main point on \vhich
Catherine holds views additional to, or other than, those other
four, \ve must point to her Purgatorial teaching, which has
received but little or no direct suggestion from anyone of
them, and \vhich, \vhatever may have been its literary pre-
cur:,ors and occasions, gives, perhaps more than anything else,
a peculiarly human and personal, original and yet still modern,
touch to \vhat would otherwise be, to our feeling, too abstract
do d antique a spiritual physiognomy.
CH.A.PTER XI
CATHERINE'S LESS ULTIMATE THIS-\VORLD DOCTRI
ES
INTRODUCTORY: CATHERINE'S LESS ULTIMATE POSITIONS,
CONCERNING OUR LIFE HERE, ARE FOUR.
'VE have no\v attempted, (by means of a doubtless more or
less artificial distinction betv;een things that, in real life, con-
stitute parts of one \vhole in a state of hardly separable inter-
penetration,) a presentation of Catherine's special, mental and
psycho-physical, character and temperament, and of the princi-
pal literary stinltIlations and Dlaterials \vhich acted upon, and
in return \vere refashioned by , that character; and \ve have also
given, in sufficient detail, the resultant doctrines and \vorld-
vie\v acquired and developed by that deep soul and noble mind.
The most important and difficult part of our task renlains,
however, still to be accomplished,-the attempt to get an (at
least approximate) estimate of the abiding meaning, place,
and \vorth of this \vhole, highly synthesized position, for and
\vithin the religious life generally and our present-day re-
quirenlents in particular. For the general outline of the
Introduction, (intended there more as an instrument of research
and classification for the literature and history then about to
be examined, than as this history's final religious appraise-
ment,) cannot dispense us from now attempting something
more precise and ultinlate.-I propose, then, to gi'ge the next
four chapters to an examination of Catherine's principal posi-
tions and practices, the first t\VO, respectively, to U the less
ultimate This-\Vorld Doctrines"; and U the Other-\Yorld
Doctrines," or U the Eschatology"; and the last t\VO to
U the Ultimate Implications and Problems" underlying both.
The last chapter shall then sum up the ,,,hole book, and
consider the abiding place and function of l\Iysticism, in its
contrast to, and supplementation of, Asceticism, Institution-
alism, and the Scientific Habit and Activity of the l\Iind.
III
.
112 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
N ow I think the less ultimate spiritual positions, as far
as they concern our life here below, which are specially
represented, or at least forcibly suggested by, Catherine, can
reasonably be accounted as four: Interpretative Religion;
a strongly Dualistic attitude towards the body; Quietude and
Passi vity; and Pure Love. I shall devote a section to each
position.
I. INTERPRETATIVE RELIGION.
I. Difficulties of the Subjective element of Religion.
Now, by Interpretative Religion, I do not mean to imply
that there is anywhere, in rerum natura, such a thing as a
religion which is not interpretative, which does not consist as
trul y of a reaction on the part of the believing soul to certain
stimulations of and within it, as of these latter stimulations
and actions. As every (even but serni-conscious) act and
state of the human mind, ever embraces both such action of
the object and such reaction of the subject,-a relatively
crude fact of sensation or of feeling borne in upon it, and an
interpretation, an incorporation of this fact by, and into, the
Ii ving tissue and organism of this mind: so is it also, neces-
sarily and above all, with the deepest and most richly
complex of all human acts and states,-the specifically
religious ones. But if this interpretative activity of the mind
was present from the very dawn of human reason, and exists
in each individual in the precise proportion as mind can be
predicated as operative within him at all: this mental activity
is yet the last element in the compound process and result
which is, or can be, perceived as such by the mind itself. The
process is too near to the observer, even when he is once
awake to its existence; he is too much occupied with the
materials brought before his mind and with moulding and
sorting them out; and this moulding and sorting activity is
itself too rapid and too deeply independent of those materials
as to its form, and too closely dependent upon them as to its
content, for the observation by the mind of this same mind's
contributions towards its own affirmations of reality and of
the nature of this reality, not ever to appear late in the history
of the human race or in the life of any human individual, or
not to be, even when it appears difficult, a fitful and an
imperfect mental exercise.
LESS ULTIMATE THIS-WORLD DOCTRINES 113
And when the discovery of this constant contribution of
the mind to its own affirmations of reality is first made, it can
hardly fail, for the time being, to occasion misgivings and
anxieties of a more or less sceptical kind. Is not the whole
of what I have hitherto taken to be a solid world of sense
outside me, and the whole of the world of necessary truth and
of obligatory goodness within me,-is it not, perhaps, all a
merely individual creation of my single mind-a mind cut off
from all effective intercourse with reality,-my neighbour's
mind included? For all having, so far, been held to be
objective, the mind readily flies to the other extreme, and
suspects all to be subjective. Or if all my apprehensions
and certainties are the resultants from the interaction between
impressions received by my senses and mind and reactions
and elaborations on the part of this mind with regard to those
impressions, how can I be sure of apprehending rightly,
unless I can divide each constituent off from the other? And
yet, how can I effect such a continuous discounting of my
mind's action by means of my own mind itself?
And this objection is felt most keenly in religion, when the
religious soul first wakes up to the fact that itself, of necessity
and continuously, contributes, by its own action, to the consti-
tution of those affirmations and certainties, which, until then,
seemed, without a doubt, to be directly borne in upon a purely
receptive, automatically registering mind, from that extra-,
super-human world which it thus affirmed. Here also, all
having for so long been assumed to be purely objective, the
temptation now arises to consider it all as purely subjective.
Or again, if we insist upon holding that, here too, there are
both objective and subjective elements, we readily experi-
ence keen distress at our inability clearly to divide off the
objective, which is surely the reality, from the subjective,
which can hardly fail to be its travesty.
And finally, this doubt and trouble would seem to find
specially ready material in the mystical element and form of
religion. For here, as we have already seen, psycho-physical
and auto-suggestive phenomena and mechanisms abound;
here especially does the mind cling to an immediate access
to Reality; and here the ordinary checks and complements
afforded by the Historical and Institutional, the Analytically
Rational, and the Volitional, Practical elements of Religion
are at a minimum. Little but the Emotional and the Specu-
latively Rational elements seems to remain; and these, more
VOL. II. I
114 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
than any others, appear incapable of admitting that they
are anything other than the pure and direct effects and
expressions of spiritual Reality.
What, then, shall we think of all this?
2. Answers to the above difficulties.
We evidently must, in the first instance, guard against any
attempt at doing a doctrinaire violence to the undeniable facts
of our consciousness or of its docile analysis, by eXplaining
all our knowledge, ør only even all our knowledge of any
single thing, as either of purely subjective or of purely
objective provenance; for everywhere and always these two
elements co-exist in all human apprehension, reason, feeling,
will, and faith. We find, throughout, an organization, an
indissoluble organism, of subjective and objective, hence a
unity in diversity, which is indeed so great that (for our o\vn
experience and with respect to our own minds at all events),
the Subjective does not and cannot exist without the Objec-
tive, nor the Objective without the Subjective.
In the next place, we must beware against exalting the
Objective against the Subjective, or the Subjective against
the Objective, as if Life, Reality, and Truth consisted in the
one rather than the other. Because the subjective element is,
on the first showing, a work of our own minds, it does not
follow (as we shall see more clearly when studying the ultimate
problems) that its operations are bereft of correspondence
with reality, or, at least, that they are further from reality
than are our sense-perceptions. For just as the degree of
worth represented by these sense-perceptions can range from
the crudest delusion to a stimulation of primary importance
and exquisite precision, so also our mental and emotional
reaction and penetration represent almost any and every
degree of accuracy and value. .
And, above all, as already implied, the true priority and
superiority lies, not with one of these constituents against the
other, but with the total subjective-objective interaction and
resultant, which is superior, and indeed gives their place and
worth to, those ever interdependent parts.
Now, in the general human experience, the Objective ele-
ment is constituted, in the first instance and for clear and ready
analysis, by the sense-stimulations; and, after some mental
response to and elaboration of these, by the larger psychic
moods; and later still, by the examples of great spiritual
attitudes and of great personalities offered by other souls to
LESS ULTIMATE THIS-WORLD DOCTRINES 115
the soul that keeps itself open to such impressions. And
though the sense of Reality (as contrasted with Appearance),
of the Abiding and Infinite (as different from the Passing and
the Finite), are doubtless awakened, however faintly and
inarticulately, in the human soul from the first, as the back-
ground and presupposition of the foreground and the middle-
distances of its total world of perceptions and aspirations:
yet all these middle-distances, as well as that great background
and groundwork, would remain unawakened but for those
humble little sense-perceptions on the one hand, and inter-
course with human fellow-creatures on the other. And in
such intercourse with the minds and souls, or with the literary
remains and other monuments of souls, either still living here
or gone hence some two thousand years or more, a mass of
mental and moral impressions and stimulations, which, in
those souls, were largely their own elaborations, offer them-
selves to anyone human mind, or to the minds of a whole
generation or country, with the apparent homogeneity of a
purely objective, as it were a sense-impression.
Especially in Religion the Historical and Institutional (as
Religion's manifestation in space and time), come down to us
thus from the past and surround us in the present, and either
press in upon us with a painful weight, or support us with a
comforting solidity, thus giving them many of the qualities
of things physically seen and touched, say, a mystery play or
a vast cathedral. And, on the other hand, the Rational,
(whether Analytic or Synthetic,) and the Emotional and
Volitional Elements, whenever they are at all preponderant
or relatively independent of the other, more objective ones,
are liable, in Religion, to look quite exceptionally subjective,
-and this in the unfavourable sense of the word, as though
either superfluous and fantastic, or as dangerous and destruc-
tive.-And yet both that look of the objective elements being,
in Religion, more self-sufficing than they appear to be in the
ordinary psychic, or the artistic, or social, or scientific life;
and that impression conveyed by the subjective elements in
Religion, as being there less necessary or more dangerous
than elsewhere, are doubtless deceptive. These impressions
are simply caused by two very certain facts. Religion is the
deepest and most inclusive of all the soul's energizings
and experiences, and hence all its constituents reveal a
difference, at least in amount and degree, when compared
with the corresponding constituents of the more superficial
"
116 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
and more partial activities of the soul; and Religion, just
because of this, requires the fullest action and co-operation, the
most perfect unity, in and through diversity, of all the soul's
powers, and all mere non-use of any of these forces, even any
restriction to the use of but one or two, is here, more readily
and extensively than elsewhere, detrimental both to the non-
exercised and to the exercised forces, and, above all, is
impoverishing to the soul itself and to its religion.
Hence, here as elsewhere, but more than anywhere, our
ideal standard will be the greatest possible development of, and
inter-stimulation between, each and all of the religious elements,
with the greatest possible unity in the resulting organism.
And yet,-in view of the very greatness of the result aimed at,
and of the fact that its even approximate attainment can,
even for anyone age of the world, be reasonably expected
only from the co-operation of the differently endowed and
attracted races and nations, social and moral grades, sexes,
ages and individuals that make up mankind,-we shall not
only be very tolerant of, we shall positively encourage, largely
one-sided developments, provided that each keeps some touch
with the elements which itself knows not how to develop in
abundance, and that it considers its own self, and works out
its own special gift and attrait, as but one out of many vari-
ously gifted and apportioned fellow-servants in the Kingdom,
-as only one of the countless, mutually complementary,
individually ever imperfect, part-expressions of the manifold
greatness, of the rich unity of spiritual humanity as willed by
God, and of God Himself.
3. Partial developments of the full Gospel Ideal.
Now in the New Testament \ve have a most instructive, at
first sight puzzling phenomenon, illustrative of the positions
just taken up. For here it is clear that, with regard to the
distinction between richly many-sided but as yet unarticu-
lated religion, and comparatively one-sided and limited but
profoundly developed religion, we have two considerably
contrasted types of spiritual tone and teaching. We get
the predominantly" Objective" strand of life and doctrine,
in the pre-Pauline parts and in their non-Pauline echoes,
i. e. in the substance of the Synoptic tradition, and in
the Epistles of St. James and of St. Peter; and we find the
predominantly II Subjective" strain in the (( Pauline" parts,
S1. Paul's Epistles and the Johannine Gospeland Letters.-And
it has become more and more clear that it is the pre-Pauline
LESS ULTIMATE THIS-WORLD DOCTRINES 117
parts which give us the most immediately and literally
faithful, and especially the most complete and many-sided,
picture of Our Lord's precise words and actions; whereas the
Pauline parts give us rather what some of these great creative
forces were and became for the first generations of Christians
and for the most penetrating of Christ's early disciples and
lovers. And yet it is the latter documents which, at first
sight, appear to be the deeper, the wider, and the more pro-
foundly spiritual; whereas the former look more superficial,
more temporal and local, and more simply popular and
material.
And yet,-though this first impression has been held to be
finally true by large masses of Christians; although the Greek
Fathers predominantly, and, in the West, the great soul of an
Augustine, and the powerful but one-sided personalities of a
Luther and a Calvin have, in various degrees and ways, helped
to articulate and all but finally fix it for the general Christian
consciousness: this view is yielding, somewhat slowly but
none the less surely, to the sense that it is the Synoptic, the
pre-Pauline tradition which contains the fuller arsenal of the
spiritual forces which have transfigured and which still inspire
the world of souls. This, of course, does not mean that the
Pauline-Johannine developments were not necessary, or are
not abiding elements towards the understanding of the
Christian spirit.
And, to come to the true answer to our objection, such a
judgment does not mean that the reflective penetration and
reapplication of the original more spontaneous message was,
from the very nature of the case, inferior to the first less
articulated announcement of the Good Tidings. But it merely
signifies that this necessary process of reflection could only
be applied to parts of the origina1, immensely rich and varied,
because utterly living, divinely spiritual, whole; and that,
thus, the special balance and tension which characterized the
original, complete spirit and temper, could, however pro-
foundly, be reproduced only in part. For the time being
this later penetration and resetting of some elements from
among the whole of Our Lord's divinely rich and simple life
and teaching, necessarily and rightly, yet none the less most
really, ignored, or put for the time into some other context,
certain other sides and aspects of that primitive treasure of
inexhaustible experience. Only the full, equable, and simul-
taneous unfolding of all the petals could have realized the
rr8 THE MYSTICAL ELE
fENT OF RELIGION
promise and content of the bud; whereas the bud, holding
enfolded within itself such various elements and combina-
tions of truth, could not expand its petals otherwise than
successively, hence, at anyone moment only somewhat one-
sidedly and partially. Each and all of these unfoldings bring
some further insight into, and articulation of, the original
spiritual organism; and that they are not more, but less, than
the totality of that primitive experience and revelation, does
not prove that such reflective work is wrong or even simply
dispensable,-for, on the contrary, in some degree or form
it was and ever is necessary to the soul's apprehension of
that life and truth,-but simply implies the immensity of
the spiritual light and impulsion given by Our Lord, and the
relative smallness of even the greatest of His followers.
Thus only if it could be shown that those parts of the New
Testament which doubtless give us the nearest approach to
the actual words and deeds of Our Lord require us to con-
ceive them as having been without the reflective and emo-
tional element; or again that, in the case of the more
derivative parts of the New Testament, it is their reflective-
ness, and not their relative incompleteness and onesidedness,
that cause them to be more readily englobed in the former
world, than that former world in the latter: could the facts
here found be used as an argument against the importance
and strict necessity for religion of the reflective and emotional,
the (( Subjective" elements, alongside of the It Objective,"
the Historical and Institutional ones.
I t is a most legitimate ground for consolation to a Catholic
when he finds the necessities of life and those of learned
research both driving us more and more to this conclusion;
for it is not deniable that Catholicism has ever refused to
do more than include the Pauline and J ohannine theologies
amongst its earliest and most normative stimulations and
expressions; and that it has ever retained, far more than
Protestantism, the sense, which (upon the whole) is most
unbrokenly preserved by the Synoptists, of, if I may so
phrase it, the Christianity of certain true elements in the pre-
and extra-Christian religions. For it is in the Synoptists
that we get the clear presentation of Our Lord's attitude
towards the Jewish Church of His time, as one, even at its
keenest, analogous to that of Savonarola, and not to that
of a Luther, still less of a Calvin, towards the Christian
Church of their day.-Indeed in these documents all idea
LESS ULTI
fATE THIS-WORLD DOCTRINES 119
of limiting Christianity to what He brQught of new, appears
as foreign to His mind as it ever has been to that of the
Catholic Church. Here we get the most spontaneous and
many-sided expression of that divinely human, widely tradi-
tional and social, all-welcoming and all-transforming spirit,
which embraces both grace and nature, eternity and time,
soul and body, attachment and detachment. The Pauline
strain stands for the stress necessary to the full spiritualiza-
tion of all those occasions and materials, as against all, mere
unregenerate or static, retention of the simple rudiments or
empty names of those things; and predominantly insists
upon grace, not nature; eternity, not thne; soul, not body:
the cross and death here, the Crown and Life hereafter. No
wonder it is this latter strain that gets repeated, with varying
truth and success, in times of acute transition, and by char-
acters more antithetic than synthetic, more great at develop-
ing a part of the truth than the whole.
Thinkers, of such wide historical outlook and unim-
peachable detachment from immediate controversial interest
as Prof. Wilhelm Dilthey and Dr. Edward Caird, have
brought out, with admirable force, this greater fulness of
content offered by the Synoptists, and how the Pauline-
Johannine writings give us the first and most important of
those concentrations upon, and in part philosophic and
mystical reinterpretations of, certain constituents of the
original happenings, actions and message, as apprehended
and transmitted by the first eye-witnesses and believers. 1 -
Here I would but try and drive home the apparently vague,
but in reality ever pressing and concrete, lesson afforded by
the clear and dominant fact of these two groups within the
New Testament itself :-of how no mere accumulation of
external happenings, or of external testimony as to their
having happened,-no amount of history or of institu-
tionalism, taken as sheer, purely positive givennesses,-can
anywhere be found, or can anywhere suffice for the human
mind and conscience, in the apprehension and embodiment
of the truth. For although, in Our Lord's most literally
transmitted sayings and doings, this continuous and inalien-
able element of the apprehending, organizing, vitalizing mind
1 E. Caird. II St. Paul and the Idea of Evolution." Hibbert Journal,
Vol. II. 1904. pp. 1-19. W. Dilthey has shown this by implication. in
his studies of Erasmus. Luther. and Zwingli: Archiv tür Geschichte der
PhilosoPkie. Vol. V, 1892. especially. pp. 381-385.
120 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
and heart,-on His part above all, but also on the part of His
several hearers and chroniclers ,-can mostly still be traced
and must everywhere be assumed: yet it is in the Pauline-
Johannine literature that the ever important, the rightly and
fruitfully U subjective," the speculative and emotional, the
mystical and the volitional strain can best be studied, both
as to its necessity and as to its special character and dangers,
because here it is developed to the relative exclusion of the
other factors of complete religion.
4. The exclusive emotionalism of Dionysius and] acopone.
N ow if even in St. Paul and St. John there is a strong
predominance of these reflective-emotional elements, in
Dionysius and Jacopone they threaten to become exclusive
of everything else. Especially is this the case with the
Pseudo-Areopagite, steeped as he is in reflection upon
reflections and in emotion upon emotions, often of the
most subtle kind: a Christian echo, with curiously slight
modifications, of Neo-Platonism in its last stage,-hence,
unfortunately, of the over-systematic and largely artificial
Proclus, instead of the predominantly experimental and often
truly sublime Plotinus. And even Jacopone, although he
has distinctly more of the historic element, is still predomi-
nantly reflective-emotional, and presents us with many a
hardly modified Platonic or Stoic doctrine, derived no doubt
from late Graeco- Roman writers and their mediaeval Christian
echoes.
5. Catherine's interpretation of the Gospel Ideal.
Catherine herself, although delightfully free from the long
scale of mediations between the soul and God which forms
one of the predominant doctrines of the Areopagite, con-
tinues and emphasizes most of what is common, and much
of what is special to, all and each of these four writers; she
is a reflective saint, if ever there was one. And of her too
we shall have to say that she is great by what she possesses,
and not by what she is without: great because of her noble
embodiment of the reflective and emotional, the mystical and
volitional elements of Christianity and Religion generally.
Religion is here, at first sight at least, all but entirely a
thought and an emotion; yet all this thought and emotion
is directed to, and occasioned by, an abiding Reality which
originates, sustains,regulates,and fulfils it. And although this
Reality is in large part conceived, in Greek and specially in
Neo-Platonist fashion, rather under its timeless and spaceless,
LESS ULTIMATE THIS-WORLD DOGTRINES .I2I
or at least under its cosmic aspect, rather as Law and Sub-
stance, than as Personality and Spirit: yet, already because
of the strong influence upon her of the noblest Platonic
doctrine, it is loved as overflowing Love and Goodness, as
cause and end of all lesser love and goodness; and the real,
though but rarely articulated, acceptance and influence of
History and Institutions, above all the enthusiastic devotion
to the Holy Eucharist with all its great implications, gives to
the whole a profoundly Christian tone and temper.
True, the Church at large, indeed the single soul (if we
would take such a soul as our standard of completeness)
requires a larger proportion of those crisp, definite outlines,
of those factual, historical, and institutional elements; a
very little less than what remains in Catherine of these
elements, and her religion would be a simple, even though
deep religiosity, a general aspiration, not a definite finding,
an explicit religion. Yet it remains certain, although ever
readily forgotten by religious souls, especially by theologi-
cal apologists, that without some degree and kind of those
outgoing, apprehending, interpreting activities, no religion is
possible. Only the question as to what these activities should
be, and what is their true place and function within the whole
religious life, remains an open one. And this question we
can study with profit in connection with such a life and
teaching as Catherine's, which brings out, with a spontane-
ous, childlike profundity and daring, the elemental religious
passion, the spiritual hunger and thirst of man when he is
once fully awake; the depths within him anticipating the
heights above him; the affinity to and contact with the
Infinite implied and required by that nobly incurable rest-
lessness of his heart, which finds its rest in Him alone Who
made it.
II. DUALISTIC ATTITUDE TOWARDS THE BODY.
And if Catherine is profoundly reflective, that reflection is,
in its general drift, deeply dualistic,-at least in the matter
of body and spirit. Their difference and incompatibility;
the spirit's fleeing of the body; the spirit's getting outside
of it,-by ecstasy, for a little while, even in this earthly
life, and by this earthly body's death, for good and all; the
body a prison-house, a true purgatory to the soul: all this
122 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
hangs well together, and is largely, in its very form, of
ultimately N eo- Platonist or Platonic origin.
I. New Testantent valuations of the body.
Now here is one of the promised instances of a double
type-if not of doctrine, yet at least of emotional valuation
in the New Testament.
(I) In the Synoptist documents, (with the but apparent, or
at least solitary, exceptions, of Jesus' Fasting in the Desert
and of His commendation of those who have made themselves
eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven,) 1 we find no direct or
acute antagonism to the body, even to the average earthly
human body, in the teaching and practice of Our Lord. The
Second Coming and its proximity do indeed, here also, dwarf
all earthly concerns, in so far as earthly.2 This background
to the teaching and its tradition was, in course of time, in
part abstracted from, in part restated.- The entrance into
life is through the narrow gate and the steep way; only if
a man turn, can he enter into the Kingdom of God; only if
he lose his soul, can he find it : 3 this great teaching and
example, as to life and joy being ever reached through death
to self and by the whole-hearted turning of the soul from its
false self to its true source, God: remains, in the very form of
its promulgation as given by the Synoptists, the fundamental
test and standard of all truly spiritual life and progress. But
as to the body in particular, Jesus here knows indeed that (, the
flesh is weak," and that we musy pray for strength against its
weakness: 4 but He nowhere declares it evil-an inevitable
prison-house or a natural antagonist to the spirit. The
beautiful balance of an unbroken, unstrained nature, and a
corresponding doctrine as full of sober earnestness as it is
free from all concentrated or systematic dualism, are here
everywhere apparent.
(2) It is St. Paul, the man of the strongest bodily passions
and temptations, he who became suddenly free from them by
the all-transforming lightning-flash of his conversion, who, on
and on, remained vividly conscious of what he had been and,
but for that grace, still would be, and of what, through that
grace, he had become. The deepest shadows are thus ever
1 Mark i. 13, and parallels; Matt. xix, 10-12.
! l\Iark vi. 8; Matt. x. 26-38; viii. 19- 22 ; xiii. 30-32; xxvi. 42, and
parallels.
3 Matt. vii, 13. 14; xviii, 1-5; xvi. 24-28.
( Mark xiv. 38. and parallels.
LESS ULTIMATE THIS-WORLD DOCTRINES 123
kept in closest contrast to the highest lights; and the line
of demarcation between them runs here along the division
between body and soul. H 0 wretched man that I am! who
shall deliver me out of the body of this death?" H In my
flesh dwelleth no good thing" : 1 are sayings which are both
keener in their tone and more limited in their range than are
Our Lord's. And we have seen how, in one of his most
depressed moods, he transiently adopts and carries on a speci-
fically Platonist attitude towards the body's relation to the
soul, as he finds it in that beautiful, profoundly Hellenistic
treatise, the Book of Wisdom. 2 This attitude evidently repre-
sents, in his strenuous and deeply Christian character, only a
passing feeling; for, if we pressed it home, we could hardly
reconcile it with his doctrine as to the reality and nature of
the body's resurrection. It is indeed clear how the Platonist,
and especially the Neo-Platonist, nlode of conceiving that
relation excludes any and every kind of body from the soul's
final stage of purification and happiness; and how the
Synoptic, and indeed the generally Christian conception of
it, necessarily eliminates that keen and abiding dualism
characteristic of the late Greek attitude.
.2. Platonic, Synoptic, and Pauline elements in Catherine's
V'lew.
Now in Catherine we generally find a.n interesting com-
bination of the Platonic form with the Synoptic substance
and spirit: and this can, of course, be achieved only because
that abiding form itself is made to signify a changed set and
connection of ideas.
(I) We have seen how she dwells much, Plotinus-like, upon
the soul's stripping itself of all its numerous garments, and
exposing itself naked to the rays of God's healing light. Yet
in the original Platonic scheme these gannents are put on
by the soul in its descent from spirit into matter, and are
stripped off again in its ascent back out of matter into spirit;
in both cases, they stand for the body and its effects. In
Catherine, even more than in Plotinus, the garments stand
for various evil self-attachments and self-delusions of the
soul; and against these evils and dangers the Synoptists
furnish endless warnings. And yet she insists upon purity,
clear separation, complete abstraction of the soul, in such
terms as still to show plainly enough the originally N eo-
1 Rom. vü. 24. 18.
I 2 Cor. V. 1-4 = Wisd. of Sol. ix. 15.
124 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
Platonist provenance of much of her form; for in the N eo-
Platonists we get, even more markedly than here, a like
insistence upon the natural dissimilarity of the body and the
soul, and a cognate longing to get away from it in ecstasy
and death. But whilst in the Neo-Platonists there is, at the
bottom of all this, a predominant belief that the senses are
the primary source and occasion of all sin, so that sin is
essen tiall y the con tamina tion of spirit by matter: in Ca the-
rine, (although she shares to the full Plotinus's thirst for
ecstasy, as the escape from division and trouble into unity
and peace,) impurity stands primarily for self-complacency,-
belief in, and love of, our imaginary independence of even
God Himself; and purity means, in the first instance, the
Ioving Him and His whole system of souls and of life, and
one's own self only in and as part of that system.
I t is very instructive to note, in this connection, how, after
her four years of directly penitential and ascetical practice,
(an activity which, even then, extended quite as much to
matters of decentralization of the self as of bodily mortifica-
tion,) her warfare is, in the first instance, all but exclusively
directed against the successive refuges and am bushes of self-
complacency and self-centredness. Thus there is significance
in the secondary place occupied, (even in the Vita, and
doubtless still more in her own mind,) by the question of
continence; indeed her great declaration to the Friar indi-
cates plainly her profound concentration upon the continuous
practice of, and growth in, Love Divine, and her comparative
indifference to the question of the systematic renunciation of
anything but sin and selfish attachmen ts and self -centrednesses
of any kind. Her conception of sinners as " cold," even more
than as dark or stained; of God as Fire, even more than as
Light; and of purity as indefinitely increasable, since Love
can grow on and on: all similarly point to this finely
positive, flame-, not snow-conception, in which purity has
ceased to be primarily, as with the Greeks, a simple absence
of soiledness, even if it be moral soiledness, and has become,
as with the Synoptic teaching, something primarily positive,
love itself.
In her occasionally intense insistence upon herself as being
all evil, a very Devil, and in some of her picturings of her
interior combat, we get, on the other hand, echoes, not of
Plato, nor again of the Synoptist teaching, but of St. Paul's
II in my flesh there dwelleth no good thing," and of his
LESS ULTIMATE THIS-WORLD DOCTRINES 125
combat between flesh and spirit.- Y et the evil which she is
thus conscious of, is not sensual nor even sensible evil and
temptation, but consists in her unbounded natural claimful-
ness and intense inclination to sensitive self-absorption.-And
this gives, indeed, to these feminine echoes of St. Paul a
certain thin shrillness which the original tones have not got,
standing there for the massive experiences of a man violently
solicitated by both sense and spirit. But it leaves her free
to note, as regards the flesh, the whole bodily organism,
(and this in beautiful sympathy with Our Lord's own geni-
ally fervent, homely heroic spirit,) not its wickedness, but
its weakness, its short-livedness, and its appeal for merciful
allowance to God, H Who knows that we are dust." Instead
of a direct and pointed dualism of two distinct substances
informed by all but incurably antagonistic principles, we
thus get a direct conflict between two dispositions of the
soul, and a but imperfect correspondence between the body
and that soul.
(2) There is, indeed, no doubt that the very ancient asso-
ciation of the ideas of Fire and of spiritual Purification goes
back, in the first instance, to the conception of the soul being
necessarily stained by the very fact of its connection with tne
body, and of those stains being finally removed by the body's
death and cremation. We find this severely self-consistent
view scattered up and down Hellenic religion and literature. l
And even in Catherine the fire, a sense of fever-heat, still seizes
the body, and this body wastes away, and leaves the soul more
and more pure, during those last years of illness.- Y et the
striking identity, between that old cluster of ideas and her
own forms of thought, brings out, all the more clearly, the
immense road traversed by spirituality between the substance
of those ideas and the essence of this thought . For in her
teaching, which is but symbolized or at most occasioned by
those physico-psychical fever-heats, the Fire is, at bottom, so
spiritual and so directly busy with the soul alone, that it is
ever identical with itself in Heaven, Hell, Purgatory, and on
earth, and stands for God Himself; and that its effects are
not the destruction of a foreign substance, but the bringing
back, wherever and as far as possible, of the fire-like soul's
disposition and equality to full harmony with its Fire-source
and Parent, God Himself.
1 See Erwin Rohde's Psyche. ed. 1898. Vol. II. p. 101, n. 2.
..
126 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
(3) Only the Prison -house simile for the body, as essen tiall y
an earthly purgatory for the soul, must be admitted, I think,
to remain a primarily Platonic, not fully Christianizable con-
ception; just as the absence of all reference by her to the
resurrection of the body will have been, in part, occasioned
by the strong element of Platonism in her general selection
and combination of ideas. Yet it would obviously be unfair
to press these two points too much, since, as to the resurrec-
tion, her long illness and evidently constant physical discom-
fort must, even of themselves, have disinclined her to all
picturing of an abiding, even though highly spiritualized,
bodily organization; and as to the likeness of her body to a
prison and purgatory of the soul, we are expressly told that
it began only with the specially suffering last part of her
life.
3. Dualism þragnzatic, not final. lis li1nits.
Now, for this whole matter of the right conception as to the
relations of body and soul, it is clear that any more than
partial and increasingly superable antagonism between body
and spirit cannot be accepted.
(I) A final Dualism is unsound in Psychology, since all the
first materials, stimulations, and instruments for even our most
abstract thinking are supplied to us by our sense-perceptions,
hence also through the body. It is narrow in Cosmology, for
we do not want to isolate man in this great universe of visible
things; and his link with animal- and plant-life, and even
with the mineral creation is, increasingly as we descend in
the scale of beings, his body. It is ruinous for Ethics, because
purity, in such a physical-spiritual being as is man, consists
precisely in spiritual standards and laws extending to and
transforming his merely physical inclinations. It is directly
contradictory of the central truth and temper of Christianity,
since these require a full acceptance of the substantial good-
nessand the thorough sanctifiableness of man's body; of God's
condescension to man's whole physico-spiritual organism; and
of the persistence or reanimation of all that is essential to
man's true personality across and after death. And it is,
at bottom, profoundly un-Catholic; the whole Sacramental
system, the entire deep and noble conception of the normal
relations between the Invisible and the Visible being through-
out of the Incamational type,-an action of the one in the
other, which develops the agent and subject at the same time
that it spiritualizes the patient, the object, is in direct conflict
LESS ULTIMATE THIS-WORLD DOCTRINES I27
with it. Neo-Platonismcamemore and more to treat the body
and the entire visible creation as an intrinsic obstacle to spirit,
to be eliminated by the latter as completely as possible; at
least this very prominent strain within it was undoubtedly
pushed on to this extreme by the Gnostic sects. But Ghris-
tianity has ever to come back to its central pre-supposition
-the substantial goodness and spiritual utility and trans-
figurableness of body and matter; and to its final end,-the
actual transformation of them by the spirit into ever more
adequate instruments, materials, and expressions of abiding
ethical and religious values and realities.
(2) The fact is that here, as practically at every chief turn-
ing-point in ethical and religious philosophy, the movement
of the specifically Christian life and conviction is not a circle
round a single centre,-detachment; but an ellipse round
two centres,-detachment and attachment. And precisely in
this difficult, but inlmensely fruitful, oscillation and rhythm
between, as it were, the two poles of the spiritual life ; in this
fleeing and seeking, in the recollection back and away from
the visible (so as to allay the dust and fever of growing dis-
traction, and to reharmonize the soul and its new gains
according to the intrinsic requirements and ideals of the
spirit), and in the subsequent, renewed immersion in the
visible (in view both of gaining fresh concrete stimulation and
content for the spiritual life, and of gradually shaping and
permeating the visible according to and with spiritual ends
and forces): in this combination, and not in either of these
two movements taken alone, consists the completeness and
culmination of Christi ani ty. 1
(3) It no doubt looks, at first sight, as though the Church,
by her canonization of the Monastic Ideal, gave us, for the
ultimate pattern and measure of all Christian perfection, as
pure and simple a flight of the soul from the body and the
world, as (short of insanity or suicide) can be made in this
life. But here we have to remember three things.
In the first place, the Church not only forbids all attacks
upon the legitimacy, indeed sanctity, of marriage, or upon its
necessity, indeed duty, for mankind at large; butSt.Augustine
and St. Thomas only articulate her ordinary, strenuously anti-
1 I owe much help towards acquiring this very important conception,
and all the above similes, to Prof. Ernst Troeltsch's admirable exposition
in his II Grundprobleme der Ethik:' Zeitschrift I. Theologie "nil Kit'che.
19 0 2. pp. 16 3- 1 7 8 .
128 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
Manichean teaching, in declaring that man was originally
created by God, in body and in soul, not for celibacy but for
marriage; and that only owing to the accidental event of the
Fall and of its effects,-the introduction of disorder and excess
into human nature, but not any corruption of its substance
and foundations,-does any inferiority,-the dispositions,
motives, and circumstances being equal,-attach to marriage
as compared with virginity.1 Hence, still, the absolute ideal
would be that man could and did use marriage as all other
legi timate functions and things of sense, as a necessary, and
ever more and more perfected, means and expression of truly
human spirituality, a spirituality which ever requires some
non-spiritual material in which to work, and by working in
which the soul itself, not only spiritualizes it, but increasingly
develops its own self.
And secondly, detachment, unification, spiritual recollection
is the more difficult, and the less obviously necessary, of the
two movements, and yet is precisely the one which (by
coming upon the extant or inchoate attachments, and by sup-
pressing or purifying them according as they are bad or good)
first stamps any and every life as definitely religious at all.
No wonder, then, that it is this sacred detachment and love
of the Cross that we notice, first of all, in the life and doctrine
of Our Lord and of all His followers, indeed in all truly
religious souls throughout the world; and that the Church
should by her teaching and selection of striking examples,
ever preach and uphold this most necessary test and ingredi-
ent, this very salt of all virile and fruitful spirituality.
But, in the third place, a man need only directly attack the
family, society, the state; or art, literature, science,-as
intrinsically evil or even as, in practice, true hindrances to
moral and religious perfection,-and the Church,-both the
learning and experimenting, and the official and formulating
Church,-will at once disavow him: so strong is, at bottom,
the instinct that attachment and variety of interests,-variety
both in kind and in degree-that materials, occasions, and
objects for spirituality to leaven and to raise, and to work
on in order to be itself deepened and developed,-are as
truly essential to the spiritual life as are detachment, and
unity, and transcendence of ultimate motive and aim; these
latter furnishing to the soul the power gradually to penetrate
1 St. Augustine, ed. Ben., Vol. X. 590b, 613a. 1973c. etc. St. Thomas.
Summa Theal.. suppl., quo 62. art. 2.
LESS ULTIl\iATE THIS-WORLD DOCTRINES I29
all that material, and, in and through this labour, more and
more to articulate its own spiritual character.
(4) No man can become, or is proclaimed to have become,
a Christian saint, \vho has not thus achieved a profound
spiritualization and unification of a more or less recalcitrant
material and multiplicity. In some cases, it is the unity and
detachment that greatly predominate over the multipJicity and
attachll1ent,-as, say, in the Fathers of the Desert. In other
cases, it is the variety and attachment that strikes us first
of all,-as, for instance, in Sir Thomas More and Edmund
Campion. And, in a third set of cases, it is the depth of the
unity and detachment, in the breadth of the variety and attach-
ment, which is the dominant characteristic, so with St. Paul
and St. Augustine. Catherine herself belongs, for her great
middle period, rather to the third group than to either of the
other two; only during her penitential period and her last
long illness does she clearly belong to the group of intensely
detached and unified saints.-It is evidently impossible in
such a matter to do more than insist upon the necessity of
both movements; upon the immensely fruitful friction and
tension which their well-ordered alternation introduces into
the soul's inner life; and upon the full ideal and ultimate
measure for the complete and perfected man, humanity at
large, being a maximum of multiplicity and attachment per-
meated and purified by a maximum of unity and detachment.
The life which can englobe and organize both these move-
ments, with their manifold interaction, will have a multitude
of warn} attachll1ents, without fever or distraction, and a great
unity of pure detachment, without coldness or emptiness: it
will have the, winning because rich, simplicity and wondrous
combination of apparent inevitableness and of seeming para-
dox furnished by all true life, hence exhibited in its greatest
fulness by the religious life which, at its deepest, is deeper
than any other kind of life.
III. QUIETUDE AND PASSIVITY. POINTS IN THIS
TENDENCY TO BE CONSIDERED HERE.
We have inevitably somewhat anticipated another matter,
in which Catherine shows aU the true Mystic's affinities: the
craving for simplification and permanence of the soul's states,
-her practice and teaching as to Quietude and Passivity.
VOL. II. K
.
130 THE MYSTICAL ELE
iENT OF RELIGION
Pushed fully home, this tendency involves four closely related,
increasingly profound, convictions and experiences. Utter
unification of the soul's functions, indeed utter unity of its
substance: i. e. the soul does one single thing, and seeI11S to
do it by one single act; itself is sÏ111ply one, and expresses
itself by one sole act. Passivity of the soul: i. e. the soul
does not apparently act at all, it simply is and receives-it is
now nothing but one pure Ï111I11ense recipiency. ImI11ediacy
of contact between the soul and God: i. e. there seeI11S to be
nothing separating, or indeed in any way between, the soul
and God. And, finally, an apparent coalescence of the soul
and God: i. e. the soul is God, and God is the sou1.-0nly the
first two points, and then the closely related question of Pure
Love, shall occupy us here; the last two points must stand
over for our penultimate chapter.
I. Distinction between experiences, their expression, and their
analysis.
We have already studied the psycho-physical occasions,
concomitants, and el11bodiments of Catherine's keen desire for,
and profound experience of, spiritual unification and passivity;
and we can have no kind of doubt as to the factual reality
and the practical fruitfulness of the state so vividly de
cribed
by her. Here we have only to inquire into the accuracy of
the analysis and terminology effected and employed by her, in
so far as they seeI11 to claim more than simply to describe
the soul's own feeling and Ï111pression as to these states thus
experienced by itself. \Ve have then to consider the nature and
truth of what can roughly be styled Quietism and Passivity.
N ow here especially will it be necessary for us carefull y
to distinguish between the direct experiences, impressions, and
instinctive requirements of the soul,-here all souls, in precise
proportion to their depth and delicacy of holiness and of
self-knowledge are our masters, and furnish us with our only
I11aterials and tests; and, on the other hand, the Ï111plications
and analysis of these states, as, in the first instance, psycho-
logical, and then as requiring elucidation with regard to their
ontological cause and reality by means of a religious philo-
sophy,-here, psychology, and religious philosophy, especially
also the discriminations and decisions of theologians and
Church authorities as expressive of these ultimate questions,
will be our guides. 1
1 My chief authorities throughout this section have been Bossuet's
Instruction sur les Etats d'Oraison of 1687. with the important documents
LESS ULTIMATE THIS-WORLD DOCTRINES 131
(1) If we start from the history of the nomenclature \vhich,
(though present only partially in Catherine's sayings, for she
nowhere uses the term" passivity"), runs, with however vary-
ing a cOll1pleteness, right through the Christian 1\1 ystics
more or less from the first, we shall find that it consists,
roughly, of three stages, and, throughout, of two currents.
There is the Pre-Pauline and Pre-Philonian stage; the stage
of Paul, Philo, and John, through Clement and Origen, on to
Gregory of Nyssa and S1. Augustine; and the stage from the
Pseudo-Dionysius onward, down to Nicolas of Coes inclusive,
and which, to this hour, still largely influences us all.-And
there are the two currents. The one tends so to emphasize
the sense and reality of the soul's simple receptivity, and
of what the soul receives at such, apparently, purely receptive
times, as to ignore, or even practically deny, the undeniable
fact that this very receptivity is, inevitably, an act of its own.
I ts decisive terms are Passivity, Fixedness, Oneness. The
other current realizes that Grace does not destroy, violate, or
supplant Nature, either entirely or in part, but that it awakens,
purifies, and cOll1pletes it, so that every divine influx is also
ever a stimulation of all the good and true energy already,
even though latently, present in the soul. And its character-
istic tenns are" Action" (as distinguished from" Activity"),
Growth, Harmony.
(2) And \ve should note with care that these two currents
are not simply Heathen and Christian respectively. For if
that great, indeed all but central, term and conception of
" Action" has been wisely generalized by most Christian
1\lystics, as the truly Christian substitute for the strongly
Neo-Platonist term" Passivity": that term and conception
of " Action" was first fixed and elucidated by Aristotle, who,
as Mr. Schiller well puts it, " has packed into his technical
term ' Energeia,' and especially into the combination ' Un-
moving Energy,' all that was most distinctive, most original,
prefixed and appended to it (fEuvres de Bossuet. ed. Versailles. 1817.
Vol. XXVII); Fénelon's chief apologetic works. especially his Instruc-
tion Pastorale. his Lettres en RéPonse à Divers Ecrits ou Ménzoires, his
Lettre sur l' Etat Passil. and his two Latin Letters to Pope Clement XI
(CEuvres de Fénelon, ed. Versailles. 1820, Vols. IV, VI, VIII, and IX) ; and
Abbé Gosselin's admirably clear. impartial. cautious, and authoritative
Analyse de la Controverse du Quiétisme. I have studied these works, and
the condemned propositions of the Beghards, of Molinos, and of Fénelon,
very carefully, and believe myself to have. in my text. taken up a position
identical with M. Gosselin's.
..
I32 THE MYSTIGAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
most fundamental, and most profound in his philosophy" ; 1
whilst the second term, " Passivity," goes on figuring in Chris-
tian
lystics and Mystical Theologies-(in spite of its demon-
strably dangerous suggestions and frequently scandalous
history)-because the religious, especially the Christian, con-
sciousness requires a term for the expression of one element
of all its deepest experiences, that character of " givenness "
and of grace, of merciful anticipation by God, which marks all
such states, in exact proportion to their depth and to the soul's
awakeness.
(3) Now Aristotle's conception of God's Unmoving Energy,
is taken over by St. Thomas in the form of God being One
Actus Purus,-sheer Energy, His very peace and stillness
coming from the brimming fulness of His infinite life. And
even finite spirit, whilst fully retaining, indeed deepening, its
own character, can and does penetrate finite spirit through
and through,-the law of Physics, which does not admit
more than one body in anyone place, having here no kind
of application,-so that the Infinite Spirit is at once con-
ceived unspiritually, if He is conceived as supplanting, and
not as penetrating, stimulating, and transforming the finite
spirits whom He made into an increasing likeness to Him,
their Maker. And hence according to the unanimous teach-
ing of the most experienced and explicit of the specifically
Theistic and Christian Mystics, the appearance, the soul's
own impression, of a cessation of life and energy of the soul
in periods of special union with God or of great advance in
spirituality, is an appearance only. Indeed this, at such
times strong, impression of rest springs most certainly from
an unusually large amount of actualized energy, an energy
which is now penetrating, and finding expression by, every
pore and fibre of the soul. The \vhole moral and spiritual
creature expands and rests, yes; but this very rest is produced
by Action "unperceived because so fleet," so near, so all
fulfilling; or rather by a tissue of single acts, mental, emo-
tional, volitional, so finely interwoven, so exceptionally
stimulative and expressive of the soul's deepest aspirations,
that these acts are not perceived as so many single acts,
indeed tha t their very collective presence is a pt to remain
unnoticed by the soul itself.
(4) Close parallels to such a state are abundant in all
1 F. C. S. Schiller, Essay" Activity and Substance," pp. 204-227,-an
admirably thorough piece of work, in Humanism, 1903. See his p. 208.
LESS ULTIMATE THIS-WORLD DOCTRINES I33
phases and directions of the soul's life. The happiest and
most fruitful moments for our aesthetic sense, those in which our
mind expands most and grows most, hence is most active in
aesthetic" action" (though not" activity") are those in which
we are unforcedly and massively absorbed in drinking in, with
quiet intentness, the contrasts and harmonies, the grand unity
in variety, the very presence and spirit of an alpine upland, or
of a river's flowing, or of the ocean's outspread, or of the Par-
thenon sculptures or of Rafael's madonnas. At such moments
we altogether cease to be directly conscious of ourselves, of
time or of the body's whereabouts; and \vhen we return to our
ordinary psychical and mental condition, we do so with an
undeniable sense of added strength and youthfulness,-some-
what as though our face, old and haggard, were, after gazing
in utter self-oblivion upon some resplendent youthfulness, to
feel, beyond all doubt, all its many wrinkles to have gone.
And so too with the n1ind's absorption in some great poem
or philosophy or character.-In all these cases, the mind or
soul energizes and develops, in precise proportion as it is so
absorbed in the contemplation of these various over-against-
nesses, these" countries" of the spiri
, as to cease to notice
its own overflowing action. It is only when the mind but
partially attends that a part of it remains at leisure to note
the attention of the other part; when the mind is fully
engrossed, and hence most keenly active, there is no part of
it sufficiently disengaged to note the fact of the engrossment
and action of, now, the whole mind. And, with the direct
consciousness of our mind's action, we lose, for the time being,
all clear consciousness of the mind's very existence. And let
it be carefully noted, this absence of the direct consciousness
of the self is as truly characteristic of the deepest, most
creative, moments of full external action: the degree of mind
and will-force operating in Nelson at Trafalgar and in Napoleon
at Waterloo, or again in St. Ignatius of Antioch in the
Amphitheatre, and in Savonarola at the stake, was evidently
in the precisely contrary ratio to their direct consciousness of
it or of themselves at all.
(5) Now if such " Passivity," or Action, is in reality the
condition in which the soul attains to its fullest energizing, we
can argue back, from this universal principle, to the nature of
the various stages and kinds of the Prayer and States of
Quiet. In each case, that is, we shall combat the still very
common conception that,-though orthodoxy, it is admitted,
134 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
requires sonle human action to remain throughout,-such
Prayer and States consist (not only as to the immediate
feeling of their subjects, but in reality and in their ultul1ate
analysis) in an ever-increasing preponderance of divine action
within the soul, and an ever-decreasing remnant of acts of
the soul itself. For such a view assumes that God supplants
man, and that, so to speak, His Hand appears unclothed
alongside of the tissue woven by man's own mind; whereas
God everywhere but stimulates and supports man whom He
has made, and His Hand moves ever underneath and behind the
tissue,-a tissue which, at best, can become as it were a glove,
and suggest the latent hand. The Divine Action will thus
stimulate and inform the human action some\vhat like the
force that drives the blood within the stag's young antlers, or
like the energy that pushes the tender sap-full fern-buds up
through the hard, heavy ground.
Thus a special intensity of divine help and presence, and
an unusual degree of holiness and of union, have nothing to
do with the fewness of the soul's own acts at such times,
but with their quality,-with the preponderance amongst
them of divinely informed acts as against merely natural, or
wrongly self-seeking, or downrightly sinful acts. And since
it is certain that living simplicity is but the harmony and
unification, the synthesis, of an organism, and hence is great in
precise proportion to the greater perfection of that synthesis,
it follows that the living, utterly one-seeming Action or State
will, at such times, contain a maximum number of inter-
penetrating acts and energies, all worked up into this
harmonious whole.
2. Four causes of inadequate analysis.
I t is plain, I think, that one thoroughly normal, one acci-
dental, and two mischievous, causes have all conspired to
arrest or to deflect the analysis of most of the Mystics them-
selves concerning Simplicity.
For one thing, the soul, as has just been shown, at such
moments of harmonious concentration and of willing and
thinking in union with God's Light and Will, necessarily
ceases, more or less, to be conscious of its own operations,
and, in looking back, braced and rested as it now is, it cannot
but think that it either did not act at all, or that its action was
reduced to a minimull1. For how otherwise could it now fee]
so rested, when, after its ordinary activity, it feels so tired
and dis
atisfied? and how otherwise could it be so unable to
LESS ULTIThfATE THIS-WORLD DOCTRINES 135
give any clear account of what happened in those minutes of
union? Yet it is, on the contrary, the very fulness of the
action which has rested, by expanding, the soul; and which
has made the soul, returned to its ordinary distractedness,
incapable of clearly explaining that, now past, concentration.
The accidental cause has been the fairly frequent, though
not necessary, connection of the more pronounced instances
of such habits of mind with more or less of the psycho-
physical phenomena of ecstasy, in the technical sense of the
word. For, in such trances, the breathing and circulation are
retarded, and the operation of the senses is in part suspended.
And it was easy to reason, from such visible, literal simplifica-
tion of the physical life, to a similar modification of the soul's
action at such times; and, from the assumed desirableness of
that psycho-physical condition, to the advantage of the sup-
posed corresponding state of the soul itself. Any tendency to
an extreme dualism, as to the relations between body and soul,
would thus directly help on an inclination to downright
Quietism.-Here it is, on the contrary, certain that only in
so far as those psycho-physical sin1plifications are the results
of, or conditions for, a deepening multiplicity in unity, a fuller
synthetic action of the soul, or, at least, of a fuller penetration
by the soul of even one lin1Ïted experience or idea-an
operation which entails not less, but more, energizing of the
soul,-are such psycho-physical simplifications of any spiritual
advantage or significance. And in such cases they could not
be indications of the cessation or diminution of the deepest
and most docile energizing of the soul.
And the mischievous causes were a mistake in Psychology
and a mistake in Theology. For, as to Psychology, not only
was simplicity assumed, (through a mistaken acceptance of
the soul's own feeling, as furnishing the ultimate analysis of
its state,) to consist, at anyone moment, of an act materially
and literally one, instead of a great organism of various
simultaneous energizings; but this one act was often held
to require no kind of repetition. Since the act was one as
against any simultaneous multiplicity, so was it one as against
any successive multiplicity, even if this latter were taken as
a repetition differentiated by number alone. And yet here
again energizing is energizing; and though the soul's acts
overlap and interpenetrate each other, and though when, by
their number and harmony, they completely fill and pacify
the soul, many of them are simultaneously or successively
..
136 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
present to the soul in their effects alone: it is nevertheless
the renewal, however peaceful and unperceived, of these acts,
which keeps the state of soul in existence. For these acts
are not simply unowned acts that happen to be present within
the soul; they are the soul's own acts, whether, in addition,
the soul is directly conscious of them or not.
And, theologically, the idea was often at \vork that it was
more worthy of God to operate alone and, as it were, in
vacuo; and more creaturely of man to make, or try to make,
such a void for Him. Yet this is in direct conflict with the
fundamental Christian doctrine, of the Condescension, the
Incarnation of God to and in human nature, and of the
persistence, and elevation of this hUl11anity, even in the case
of Christ Himself. God's action does not keep outside of,
nor does it replace, man's action; but it is,-Our Lord Him-
self has told us,-that of yeast working in l11eal, which
manifests its hidden power in proportion to the mass of
meal which it penetrates and transforms.
3. Four Quietistic aberrations.
Now it is certain that the error of Quietism has, in no
doubt many cases, not remained confined to such mistakes in
psychological analysis and theological doctrine, but that
these have joined hands with, and have furnished a defence
to, sloth and love of dreamy ease, or to some impatience
of the necessary details of life, or to fanatical attachment
to some one mood and fornl of experience; and that they
ha ve, thus reinforced, ravaged not a few wills and souls.
Four chief Quietistic aberrations can be studied in history.
(1) The neglect or even contempt of vocal prayer, and of
the historical and institutional elements of religion, at least
in the case of more advanced souls, is one of these abuses.-
Now it is true, and Catherine has been a striking instance,
that the proportion of all these different elements towards
one another vary, and should vary, considerably between soul
and soul, according to the attrait and degree of advance of
each; that the soul's most solid advance is in the direction of
an ever-deepened spiritual devotedness, and not in that of a
multiplication of particular devotions; that the use of even
the more central of those elements and means may, for souls
called to the prayer of Quiet, become remarkably elastic and
largely unmethodized; and that, for such souls (and, in various
degrees and ways, sooner or later, for perhaps most other
souls), a prayer of peacefully humble expectation and of all
LESS ULTIMATE THIS-WORLD DOCTRINES 137
but inarticulate, practically indescribable, brooding of love,
and of dÜl1, expansive trust and conformity is possible, some-
times alone possible, and is proved right and useful, if it
leaves them strengthened to act and to suffer, to help and to
devote themselves to their fellows, to Christ, and to God.
But it remains equally true, even for these as for all other
souls, that the historical and institutional elements must ever
remain represented, and sufficiently represented; indeed the
persistence in these elements of religion will be one of the
chief means for avoiding delusion. \Ve have St. Teresa's
experience and teaching here, as a truly classical instance.
And if the prayer of Quiet will give a special colour, depth,
and unity to those l110re contingent-seeming practices, these
practices will, in return, give a particular definiteness, content,
and creaturely quality to that prayer. And thus too the uni-
versally and profoundly important union and interchange with
souls of other, equally legitimate, kinds and degrees of spiritu-
ality will be kept up. Only the SUl11-total of all these souls,
only the complete invisible Church, is the full Bride of Christ;
and though the souls composing her may and should each
contribute a varying predominance of different elements, no
soul should be entirely without a certain amount of each of
these constituents.
(2) Another abuse is the neglect, contempt, or misapplied fear
of not directly religious occupations and labours which, how-
ever otherwise appropriate or even necessary to this soul's
gro\vth and destination, tend to disturb its quiet and to
absorb a part of its time and attention. Here it is doubtless
true that the other elements of religion are also all more or
less apprehensive and jealous with regard to actual, or even
only possible, non-religious rival interests. And it is certain
that they are all right in so far as that a certain interior
leisureliness and recollection, a certain ultimate preference for
the spiritualizing religious force of the soul as against the
materials, non-religious and other, which that force is to
penetrate, are necessary to the soul that would advance.
But the fear that characterizes the Historical and Institu-
tional elements is rather a fear, respectively, of error and of
disobedience and singularity, whereas on the part of the
Mystical element it is a fear of distraction and absorption
away from the Unu11
Necessariul1t of the soul. Perhaps even
among the Canonized Mystics there is none that has more
impressively warned us, both by word and example, against
138 THE 1\IYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
this insidious danger, than the distinguished Platonist scholar
and deep spiritual writer, Père Jean Nicolas Grou, who,
right through the long mystical period of his life, alter-
nated his prayer of Quiet with extensive and vigorous critical
\vork on the Graeco-Latin classics, and whose practice only
wants further expansion and application, (according to the
largely increased or changed conditions of such not directly
religious work,) in order to bear much fruit, not only for criti-
cism and science, but, (by the return-effect of such occupations
upon the soul's general temper and particular devotional
habits,) for spirituality itself. But we must return to this
point more fully in our last chapter.
(3) The third abuse is the neglect or contempt of morality,
especially on its social, visible, and physical sides. Particular
Mystics, and even whole 1\Iystical schools and movements,
have undoubtedly in some instances, and have, possibly, in
many more cases, been maligned on this point, since even such
a spotless life as Fénelon's, and that of such a profoundly well-
intentioned woman as Madan1e Guyon, did not, for a time,
escape the most unjust suspicions. It is also true that, as a
man advances in spirituality, he lays increasing stress upon
the intention and general attitude of the agent, and increas-
ingly requires to be judged by the same interior standard, if
he is to be rightly understood at all. God may and does, to
humble and purify him, allow painful temptations and trials
from within to combine, apparently, against him, with perse-
cutions and much isolation from without. And the difference
rather than the similarity, between Religion and Morality,-
the sense of pure grace, of free pardon, of the strange profound
" gi venness" of even our fullest willings and of our most
emphatically personal achievements,-can and should grow in
him more and more.
And yet it is clear that there must have been some fire to
account for all that smoke of accusation; that the material
and the effect outwards, the body of an action, do matter, as
well as does that action's sPirit,. that this body does not only
act thus outwards, but also inwards, back upon the spirit of
the act and of the agent; and that temptations and trials are
purifying, not by their simple presence but in proportion as
they are resisted, or, if they have been yielded to, in propor-
tion as such defeats are sincerely deplored and renounced.
Thus everywhere the full development of anyone part of life,
and the true unity of the whole, have to be achieved through
LESS ULTIMATE THIS-WORLD DOCTRINES 139
the gradual assimilation of at first largely recalcitrant other
elements, and \vithinan ever-abiding multiplicity-a maximum
number of parts and functions interacting \vithin one great
organism. And hence not the outrage, neglect, or supersession
of morality, but, on the contrary, its deeper development, by
more precise differentiation from, and more organic integration
into, religion proper, must, here again and here above an, be
the final aim. Once more again it is the Incarnational type
\vhich is the only fully true, the only genuinely Christian
one.
(4) And, finally, there are certain hardly classifiable fanati-
cisms, \vhich are nevertheless a strictly logical consequence
from a \vrongly understood Quiet and Passivity,-from
Quietism in its unfavourable, condemned sense. I am think-
ing of such a case as that of l\iargarethe Peters, a young
Quietist, \vho caused herself to be crucified by her girl-
companions, at \Vildenspuch, near Schaffhausen, in 1823,-
in order to carry out, in full literalness and separateness, the
utmost and most painful passivity and dependence and resist-
less self-donation, in direct imitation of the culminating act of
Christ's life on earth and of His truest followers.! Here, in the
deliberate suicide of this undoubtedly noble Lutheran girl, \ve
get an act which but brings out the strength and \veakness
of Quietism \vherever found. For the greatest constituents of
the Christian spirit are undoubtedly there: free self-sacrifice,
impelled by love of God, of Christ, and of all men, and by
hatred of self.- Yet, because they here suppress other, equally
necessary, constituents, and are out of their proper context
and bereft of their proper checks, they but render possible and
actual a deed of piteous self-delusion. Ho\v terrible is false
simplification, the short cut taken by pure logic, operating
\vithout a sufficient induction from facts, and within an ardent
self-iInmolating temperament!
4. ROlne's conde11uzaÜon of Quietism.
All this is abundantly sufficient to explain and justify
Rome's condemnation of Quietism. The tenn (( Quietists JJ
appears, I think, for the first time,-at least in an invidious
sense,-in the Letter \vhich Cardinal Caraccioli, Archbishop
1 See Heinrich Heppe. Geschichte der Quietistischen Myst'ik. Berlin, 1875,
p. 52I. The obviously strong partisan bias of the author against Rome,
-of which more lower down,-does not destroy the great value of the
large collection of now, in many cases, most rare and inaccessible docu-
ments given, often in extenso. in this interesting book.
14 0 THE
1:YSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGIO
of Naples, addressed to Pope Innocent XI (Odescalchi) on
June 30, 1682, and in which he graphically describes the
abuses which, (under pretext or through the misapplication
of spiritual Quiet and Passivity,) had now appeared in his
Diocese: souls apparently incapable of using their beads
or making the sign of the Cross; or which will neither say
a vocal prayer nor go to Confession; or which, when in
this prayer of Quiet, even when at Holy Communion, will
strive to drive away any image, even of Our Lord Himself,
that may present itself to their imagination; or which tear
do\vn a Crucifix, as a hindrance to union \vith God; or which
look upon all the thoughts that come to them in the quietude
of prayer, as so many rays and effluences from God Himself,
exempting them henceforth from every law.!
Yet it is important to bear \vell in mind, the special circum-
stances, the admitted limits, and the probable signification of
Rome's condemnations.
(1) As to the circumstances of the time , it appears certain that
it \vas the ready circulation of the doctrines of the Spanish
priest, l\figuel de Molinos in the Guida Spirituale, 1675, and
the abuses of the kind \ve have just no\v detailed, and that
sprang from this circulation, \vhich formed the primary reason
and motive for the othenvise excessively severe treatment of
a man and a book, \vhich had both received the very highest
and the most deliberate ecclesiastical approbations. That
these two circumstances were the determining causes of at
least the severity of his condemnation is \vell brought out
by the circumstance that, during his two years' trial (1685-
1687), not only the short Guida but his \vhole obtainable
correspondence (some twenty thousand letters) were ex-
amined, and that it is at least as much on such occasional
manuscript material, and on Molinos's own oral admissions,
-in prison and doubtless, in part at least, under torture,-
that the condemnation was based, containing, as it does,
certain revoltingly immoral propositions and confessions,
admittedly absent from his published \vritings.
But if at least some shadow of doubt rests upon the moral
character of Molinos, not a shadow of such suspicion or of
doubt concerning his perfectly Catholic intentions can, in
justice, be allowed to rest upon his chief follo\ver and the most
distinguished apologist for his doctrine, the saintly Oratorian
1 Heppe, op. cit. pp. 130-133.
LESS ULTIMATE THIS-WORLD DOCTRINES I41
and Bishop, the much-tried Cardinal Petrucci; any more than
Fénelon's moral and spiritual character, or deeply Catholic
spirit and intentions, can, (in spite of the painfully fierce and
unjust attack upon both by Bossuet in his formally classic
invective, Relation sur le Quiétis1ne,) for one moment be
called in question.! Other admittedly deeply spiritual and
entirely well-intentioned Catholics, whose \vritings were also
condemned during this time when devotional expressions
having an at all quietistic tinge or drift were very severely
judged, are lVlère Marie de l'Incarnation (Marie Guyard), a
French Ursuline Religious, who died in Canada in r672, and
the process of ,vhose Beatification has been introduced; the
saintly French layman, Jean de Bernières-Louvigny, much
admired by Fénelon, who died in r659; the very interior,
though at times some,vhat fantastic, Secular Priest, Henri
Marie Boudon, who died in 1702; and the very austere but
highly experienced ascetical writer, the Jesuit Père Joseph
Surin, whom Bossuet had formally approved, and ,vho died in
r668. 2 But Madame Guyon herself, that much-tried and
vehemently opposed ,voman, was held, by many an undoubtedly
Catholic-minded, experienced and close observer, to be (in
spite of the largely misleading and indeed incorrect character
of many of her analyses and expressions) a truly saintly,
entirely filial Catholic. 3
(2) As to the limits of these condemnations, we must remem-
ber that only two of them,-those of Molinos and of Fénelon,-
claim to be directly doctrinal at all; and that Fénelon ,vas
never really compromised in the question of Quietism proper,
but was condemned on questions of Pure Love alone. Bossuet
himself ,vas far less sound as against the central Quietist
doctrine of the One Act, which, unless formally revoked, lasts
on throughout life, and hence need never be repeated;
Fénelon's early criticism of the Molinos propositions remains
one of the clearest extant refutations of that error. Again in
the matter of the Passivity of advanced souls, Bossuet was
distinctly less normal and sober than Fénelon: for whilst
1 There is a good article on Petrucci in the Catholic Freiburg Kirchen-
lexikon, 2nd ed., 1895; and Heppe. in his Geschichte. pp. 135-144, gives
extracts from his chief book. Bossuet's attack, æuvres, ed. 1817, Vol.
XXIX.
2 Reusch, Der Index der verbotenen Bücher. 1885, Vol. II, pp. 611; 622.
623; 62 5.
a Gosselin's Analyse, æ'Uvres de Fine/on. ed. cit. Vol. IV. pp. xci-xcv.
I42 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
Fénelon taught that in no state does the soul lose all capacity,
although the facility may greatly vary, to produce distinct acts
of the virtues or vocal prayers and other partially external
exercises, Bossuet taught that, in some cases, all capacity of
this kind is abolished. 1 U I take," says Fénelon, U the tern1S
( Passive' and ( Passivity' as they actually appear every-
where in the language of the (sound) .Nlystics, as something
opposed to the terms ( active' and' activity._': 'Passivity,'
taken in the sense of an entire inaction of the will, would be
a heresy." And he then opposes U Passivity," not to
" Action," but to that" Activity," which is a merely natural,
restless, and hurried excitation. 2
(3) And as to the abiding significance of the whole anti-
quietist decisions and measures, we shall do well to consider the
following large facts. From St. Paul and St. John to Clement
of Alexandria and Origen; from these to Dionysius the
Areopagite; from the Areopagite to St. Bernard of Clairvaux
and then the Franciscan and Dominican Mystics; from these,
again, on to the great Renaissance and Counter-Reformation
saints and writers of this type,-the German Cardinal Nicolas
of Coes and the Italian St. Catherine of Genoa, the Spaniards
St. Teresa and St. John of the Cross, and the French Saint
Francis de Sales and Saint Jane Frances de Chantal, we
get a particular type of religious experience and doctrine,
which but unfolds and concentrates, with an unusual articu-
lation, breadth, and depth, what is to be found, on some
sides of their spiritual character and teaching, among Saints
and religious souls of the more mixed type, such as St.
Augustine, St. Anselm, St. Thomas of Aquin, and St. Ignatius
Loyola. And this mixed type, bearing \vithin it a considerable
amount of that mystical quiet and emotional-speculative
element, is again but a deepening, a purification and a
realization of one of the profoundest affinities and constituents
of every human heart and will.
Hence, even in the thickest of the quietist controversy,
when that mystical element must have seemed, to many, to be
discredited once for all, those best acquainted \vith the rich
history of the Church, and \vith the manifold requirements
of the abiding religious consciousness, could not and did not
doubt that all that was good, deep, and true in that element
1 Fénelon, Explication . . . des Proþositions de Molinos (æuvres. Vol.
IV, pp. 25-86). Gosselin, Analyse (ibid. pp. ccxvi-ccxxiii).
2 æuvres de Fénelon. Vol. VIII, pp. 6, 7.
LESS ULTIMATE THIS-WORLD DOCTRINES 143
\vould continue to be upheld by, and represented in, the
Church.-And it is not difficult to point to the more or less
Mystical souls furnished by the Monks, the Friars; the Clerks-
Regular, specially the Jesuits; the Secular Clergy; and the
Laity, down to the present day. Such writers and Saints as
the Père de Caussade (d. about r770) on the one hand, and
Père Jean N. Grou (d. r803) and the Curé d'Ars (d. 1859)
on the other hand, carryon the t\VO streams of the predomi-
nantly mystical and of the mixed type,-streams so cleady
observable before r687 and r699. Quietism, the doctrine of
the One Act; Passivity in a literal sense, as the absence or
imperfection of the power and use of initiative on the soul's
part in any and every state: these doctrines \vere finally
condemned, and most rightly and necessarily condemned;
the Prayer of Quiet, and various states and degrees of an
ever-increasing predominance of Action over Activity,-
an Action which is all the more the soul's very own, because
the more occasioned, directed, and informed by God's action
and stimulation,-these, and the other chief lines of the
ancient experience and practice, remain as true, correct, and
necessary as ever.
5. Rome's alleged change of front.
And yet it is undeniable that the Roman events between
r675 and r688 do seem, at first sight, to justify the strongly
Protestant Dr. Heppe's contention that those twelve years,-
not to speak of the later troubles of Madame Guyon and of
Fénelon,-\vitnessed a complete volte face, a formal self-stulti-
fication, of the Roman teaching and authority, on these
difficult but immediately important matters.
(r) Let us put aside the many passages in Molinos's Guida
which were but (more or less) literal reproductions of the
teachings of such solemnly approved authorities as Saints
Teresa, Peter of Alcantara, John of the Cross, Francis de
Sales and Jane Frances de Chantal,-passages which, of
course, remained uncondemned even in Molinos's pages, but
which it would often be difficult to distinguish fron1 the parts
of his book that were censured. Yet there still remain such
facts as the follo\ving.
Juan Falconi's Alfabeto and Lettera were at their Fifth
Italian edition, 1680, and all five editions had been approved
by the J\;laster of the Apostolic Palace; but only in 1688
were these \vritings forbidden. Yet the Lettera contains, \vith
unsurpassed directness and clearness, the central doctrine of
144 THE MYSTIGAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
Quietism: an exhortation to the production of one single
lively Act of Faith, which will then continue uninterruptedly
through the whole earthly life into eternity, and which, conse-
quently, is not to be repeated.!
1\10linos's Guida and Breve Trattato appeared in RODle,
respectively in 1675 and r681, with the approbations of five
theologians, four of whom were Consultors of the Holy
Office,-the Archbishop of Reggio; the Minister-General
of the Franciscans; the late General of the Carmelites; Father
l\lartin Esparza, the same Jesuit Theologian-Professor of
the Roman College who, some years before, had been one of
those who had examined and approved S1. Catherine's VÜa
ed Opere
. and the actual General of the Carmelites. 2
Even after these two writings of l\Iolinos had been criticised
by the Jesuits Bell Huomo and Segneri and the Clerk Regular
Regio, (Segneri enjoying a deservedly immense reputation,
and showing in this affair much moderation and a strong
sense of the legitimate claims of Mysticism,) the Inquisition
examined these criticisnls, and forbade, not the incriminated
writings of Molinos and Petrucci, but the critique of Bell
Huomo donee eorrl'gatur, and those of Regio and of Segneri
(in his Lettera of 1681) absolutely. Segneri's subsequent
C oneordia almost cost him his life, so strong was the popular
veneration of Molinos.
Molinos indeed was the guest of Pope Innocent XI hiIn-
self, and the friend and confidant, amongst countless other
spiritually-minded souls, of various Cardinals, especially of
the deeply devout Petrucci, Bishop of J esi, who was raised
to the Cardinalate eighteen months after the beginning of
Molinos's trial. The imprisonment of l'vIolinos began in May
r685, but the trial did not end till August 1687, when (after
nineteen (( Principal Errors of the New Contemplation" had
been censured by the Holy Office in February r687) sixty-
eight propositions, out of the two hundred and sixty-three
which had been urged against him, were solemnly condemned:
of these the clearly and directly immoral ones being admit-
tedly not derived from any printed book, or indeed any ever
published letter of lVlolinos. 3
1 Heppe, oþ. cit. p. 62, Reusch, oþ. cit. Vol. II, pp. 619, 620.
: I write with these approbations before me, as reprinted in the Recueil
de Diverses Pièces concernant le Quiétisme, Amsterdam, 1688.
3 æuvres de Bossuet, ed. 1817, Vol. XXVII, pp. 497-502. Heppe, op.
cit. pp. 27g n.; 273-281. Denzinger, Encheiridion. ed. 1888. pp. 266-274.
LESS ULTI1\lATE THIS-WORLD DOCTRINES 145
(2) To estimate Rome's attitude (as far as it concerns the
ultimate truth and completeness of these doctrines, taken in
their most characteristic and explicit forms) fairly, we shall
have to put aside all questions as to the motives that impelled,
and the methods that were employed, by either side against
the other. Molinos may have been even worse than the
condemned propositions represent, and yet Petrucci would
remain a saintly soul; and we certainly are driven to ask with
Leibniz: U Si Molinos a caché du venin so us ce miel, est-il
juste que Petrucci et autres personnes de mérite en soient
responsables? "1 But neither the wickedness of the one nor
the sanctity of the other would make the doctrines propounded
by them, objectively, any less solid or more spiritual than
they are in themselves. The acutely anti-Roman Anglican
Bishop Burnet may not have invented or exaggerated \vhen
he wrote from Rome, during those critical years, that one
of the chief motives which actuated the opponents of the
Quietists was the fact that, though the latter U were observed to
become more strict in their lives, more retired and serious in
their mental devotions, yet . . . they were not so assiduous
at Mass, nor so earnest to procure
lasses to be said for their
friends: nor . . . so frequently either at Confession or in
processions": and so U the trade of those that live by these
things "vas sensibly sunk." 2 And the cruel injustice of many
details and processes of the movement against the Quietists,-
a movement which soon had much of the character of a
popular scare and panic, in reaction against a previous, in
part, heedless enthusiasm,-are beyond dispute or justification.
Yet mercenary and ruthless as part of the motives and much
of the action of the anti-quietists doubtlessly were, the
question as to the worth and wisdom of Quietism, (taken
objectively, and not as an excusable counter-excess but as
a true synthesis of the spiritual life,) remains precisely where
it \vas before.
(3) Now I think that two peculiarities, most difficult to notice
at the time, seriously differentiate the Molinist movement
from the great current of fully Catholic Mysticism, even in
those points and elements where the two are materially alike
or even identical; and yet that thesp, peculiarities are but the
caricature (through further emphasis and systematization) of
certain elements present, in a more latent and sporadic
1 Reusch. op. cit. Vol. II, p. 618 n. I.
VOL. II.
I See Heppe. p. 264. n.
L
146 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
manner, in the formulae and philosophic assumptions or
explanations of the older l\iysticism,-elements which had
been borrowed too largely from an, at bottom, profoundly
anti-Incarnational philosophy, not to be of far less value and
of much greater danger than the profoundly true experiences,
nobly spiritual maxims, and exquisite psychological descrip-
tions which that predominantly Neo-Platonist framework
handed on.
The first peculiarity is that the older Mystics, especially
those of the type of St. Catherine of Genoa and St. John of
the Cross, but even also those of the more U mixed" type of
Mysticism, such as St. Teresa, had indeed quite freely used
terms which are vividly true as descriptions of the prima facie
aspect and emotional impression of certain states and ex-
periences of the soul: U empty," U fixed," U motionless," U the
reason and the will have ceased to act," U doing nothing,"
U incapable of doing anything," H moved by irresistible grace,"
U but one act," U one single desire" : these and equivalent
expressions occur again and again. But these sayings do not
here lead up to such a deliberate and exclusive rule as is
that given by Falconi, and repeated by Molinos in his Guida,
Nos. 103-106.1
This doctrine of the One Act, in this its negative form,-
for it is not to be repeated,-and in its application to the whole
waking and sleeping life, is first an exclusive concentration
upon, and then a wholesale extension of, one out of the several
trends of the older teaching, a doctrine which, compared with
that teaching in its completeness, is thin and doctrinaire, and
as untrue to the full psychological explanation and working
requirements of the soul as it is readily abusable in practice
and contrary to the Incarnational type of religion. It is
impossible not to feel that the manifold great ocean-waters
of life, that the diversely blowing winds of God's Spirit are
here, somehow, expected to flow and breathe in a little short-
cut, single channel, through a tiny pipe; one more infallible
recipe or prescription is here offered to us, hardly' more
adequate than the many similar U sure" roads to salvation,
declared by this or that body of devout religionists to attach
to the practice or possession of this or that particular prayer
or particular religious object.
And the second difference is that the older Catholic Mystics
i Recueil de Diverses P'z"èces. pp. 61. 62.
LESS ULTIMATE THIS-WORLD DOCTRINES 147
leave less the impression that the external side of religion. its
body, is of little or no importance, and indeed very readily
an obstacle to its interior side, its soul. And this, again, for
the simple reason that their teaching is, in general, less
systematic and pointed, more incidental, and careless of much
self-consistency.
(4) Yet these two differences have largely sprung from the
simple pressing and further extension of precisely the least
satisfactory, the explanatory and systematic side,-the form
as against the content,-of the older Mystics. For once the
more specifically Neo-Platonist constituent, in those Mystics'
explanation and systematization, was isolated from the elements
of other provenance which there had kept it in check, and now
became, as it were, hypostasized and self-sufficient, this con-
stituent could not but reveal, more clearly than before, its
inadequacy as a form for the intensely organic and U incar-
national" spiritual realities and processes which it attempted
to show forth. That N eo- Platonist consti tuen t , always present
in those ancient Mystics, had ever tended to conceive the soul's
unity, at anyone moment, as a something outside of all multi-
plicity \vhatsoever. Hence this character of the simultaneous
unity had only to be extended to the successive unity,-and
the literally One Act, as in the present so throughout the
future, became a necessary postulate.
And that same constituent had, even in those great teachers
of profound maxims, exquisite religious psychology, and
noblest living, tended, (however efficaciously checked by all
this their Christian experience and by certain specifically
Platonist and Aristotelian elements of their philosophy,) to-
wards depreciating the necessity, importance, indeed even the
preponderant utility, of the External, Contingent, Historical
and Institutional, and of the interchange, the inter-stimulation
between these sides and expressions of religion and its
internal centre and spirit.
Perhaps, amongst all the great ecclesiastically authorized
Mystics of that past, the then most recent of them all, St.
John of the Cross, comes, by his (theoretically continuous
though in his practice by no means exclusive) insistence upon
the abstractive and universal, the obscure and invisible, the
self-despoiling and simplifying element and movement, nearest
to an exclusion of the other element and movement. Indeed
the Quietists' generaHy strong insistence upon the necessity
of a Director and upon Frequent Communion gives their
148 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
teaching, when taken in its completeness, a prima facie
greater Institutionalisnl than is offered by the spiritual theory
of the great Spaniard. Yet if, even in him, one misses, in
his theoretical system, a sufficiently organic necessity for the
outgoing movement, a movement begun by God Himself, and
which cannot but be of fundamental importance and influence
for believers in the Incarnation, there is as complete an absence
of the doctrinaire One-Act recipe for perfection as in the
most Historical and Institutional of Christian teachers. But
n10re about this hereafter.
6. Four needs recognized by Quietisl1z.
Quietism, then, has undoubtedly isolated and further ex-
aggerated certain explanatory elements of the older l\1ysticism
\vhich, even there, were largely a weakness and not a strength;
has thus underrated and starved the Particular, Visible,
Historical, Institutional constituents of Religion; and has,
indeed, misunderstood the nature of true Unity everywhere.
Yet the very eagerness \vith which it \vas welcomed at the
time,-in France and Italy especially,-and this, not only
as a fashion by the Quidnuncs, but as so much spiritual
food and life by many a deeply religious soul; and the
difficulty, and not infrequent ruthlessness of its suppression,
indicate plainly enough that, with all its faults and dangers,
it was divining and attempting to supply certain profound
and abiding needs of the soul. I take these needs to be the
following four.
(r) Man has an ineradicable, and, when rightly assuaged,
profoundly fruitful thirst for Unity,-for Unification, Synthesis,
Hannonization; for a living System, an Organization both
within and without himself, in which each constituent gains
its full expansion and significance through being, and more
and more becoming, just that part and function of a great,
dynamic whole; a sense of the essential and ultimate organic
connection of all things, in so far as, in any degree or form,
they are fair and true and good. And this sense and in-
evitable requirement alone explain the surprise and pain
caused, at first, to us all, by the actual condition of mutual
aloofness and hostility, characteristic of most of the con-
stituents of the world within us, as of the world around us,
towards their fellow-constituents. A truly atomistic world,
-even an atomistic conception of the world,-of life, as a
collection of things one alongside of another, on and on, is
utterly reptùsive to any deeply religious spirit whose self-
LESS ULTI
IATE THIS-WORLD DOCTRINES 149
knowledge is at all equal to its aspirations.-No wonder,
then, if the Quietists, haunted by the false alternative of
one such impenetrable atom-act or of an indefinite number
of them, chose the One Act, and not a multitude of them.
(2) Man has a deep-seated necessity to purify himself by
detachment, not only from things that are illicit but even
from those that are essential and towards which he is bound
to practise a deep and warm attachment. There is no
shadow of theoretical or ultimate contradiction here: to love
one's country deeply, yet not to be a Chauvinist; to love one's
wife tenderly, yet not to be uxorious; to care profoundly
for one's children, yet to train, rebuke, and ever brace then1,
when necessary, up to suffering and even death itself: these
things so little exclude each the other, that each attachment can
only rightly grow in and through the corresponding detach-
ment. The imperfection in all these cases, and in all the
analogous, specifically religious ones, lies not in the objects
to be loved, nor in these objects being many and of various
degrees and kinds of lovableness, nor in the right (both
effective and affective, appropriately varied) love of them:
but simply in our actual manner of loving them.-No wonder
then that Quietism, face to face with the false alternative of
either Attachment or Detachment, chose Detachment, (the
salt and the leaven of life) and not attachment (life's meat
and meal).
(3) Man has a profound, though ever largely latent, capacity
and need for admiration, trust, faith; and does not by any
means improve solely by direct efforts at self-improvement,
and by explicit examinations of his efforts and failures;
but, (a little from the first, and very soon as much, and later
on far more,) he progresses by means of a happy absorption
in anything clean and fruitful that can and does lift him out
of and above his smaller self altogether.-And such an absorp-
tion will necessarily be unaccompanied, at the time, by any
direct consciousness on the part of the mind as to this its
absorption. And, religiously, such quiet concentrations win, in
so far as they are at all analyzable after the event, consist in
a quite inarticulate, and yet profound and spiritually renovat-
ing, sense of God; and they will have to be tested, not by theIr
describable content, but by their ethical and religious effects.
H Psychology and religion," says that great psychological
authority, Prof. William James, H both admit that there are
forces, seemingly outside of the conscious individual, that bring
150 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
redemption to his life." II A man's conscious wit and will, so
far as they strain after the ideal, are aiming at something only
dimly and inaccurately imagined, whilst the deeper forces of
organic ripening wi thin him tend towards a rearrangement
that is pretty surely definite, and definitely different fron1
\vhat he consciously conceives and determines. It may conse-
quently be actually interfered with by efforts of too direct
and energetic a kind on our part. II I-No wonder then that
Quietism, finding this element of quiet incubation much
ignored and starved in the lives of most religious souls, fle\v
to the other extreme, of making this inarticulateness and wise
indirectness of striving into the one test and measure of the
rerfection of all the constituents of the religious life, instead
of insisting upon various degrees and combination of full and
direct consciousness and articulation, and of much dimness
and indirect alertness, as each requiring the other, and as
both required by the complete and normal life of the soul.
(4) And Man has a deep-seated sense of. shame, in precise
proportion as he becomes spiritually awake, about appro-
priating to himself his virtues and spiritual insight, even
in so much as he perceives and admits his possession of them.
Not all his consciousness and conviction of the reality of his
own efforts and initiative, can or does prevent a growing sense
that this very giving of his is (in a true sense) God's gift,-
that his very seeking of God ever implies that he had, in some
degree, already found God,-that God had already sought him
out, in order that he might seek and find God.-No wonder
then that, once more shrinking from a Unity constituted in
a lVlultiplicity, Quietism should, (with the apparently sole
choice before it, of God Himself operating literally all, or of
man subtracting something from that exclusive action and
honour of God,) have chosen God alone and entire, rather
than, as it were, a fragmentary, limited, baffled influence
and efficiency of the Almighty within His Own creature.
Yet here again the greater does not supplant, but informs, the
lesser; and the lncamational action of God is, in this supreme
question also, the central truth and secret of Christianity.
7. Multiplicity and unity, in different proportions, needful
for all sPiritual life.
We find, then, that it is essential for even the most advanced
souls, that they should keep and increase the sense and the
1 Var'Ìeties 01 Religious Experience. 1902. pp. 209. 211.
LESS ULTIMATE THIS-WORLD DOCTRINES 151
practice of a right multipJicity, as ever a constituent and
essential condition of every concrete, living unity; of a right
attachment, as ever the necessary material and content for a
fruitful and enriching detachment; of a right consciousness
and articulation of images, thoughts, feelings, volitions, and
external acts, as ever stimulations, restful alternations, and
food for a wise and strengthening prayer or states of Quiet
and inarticulation; and of a right personal initiative and
responsibility, as the most precious means and element
for the operations of God.
We find, too, that it is equally important, for even the most
imperfect souls, to be helped towards some, (though but ever
semi-conscious and intermittent,) sense of the unity which
alone can give much worth or meaning to their multiplicity;
of the detachment which alone can purify and spiritualize
their attachments; of the self-oblivion, in rapt and peaceful
admiration, which alone can save even their right self-watch-
ings and self-improvements from still further centring them in
themselves; and of the true self-abandonment to pure grace
and the breathing of God's Spirit, which alone can give a
touch of winning freedom and of joyful spaciousness to all
the prudence and right fear and conscious responsibility
\vhich, left alone, will hip, darken and weigh down the
religious soul.
And thus \ve shall find that there is no degree of per-
fection for anyone set of souls which is not, in some form and
amount, prefigured and required by all other souls of good-
will; and é 1 gain, that there is no one constituent, to which
anyone SOla i3 specially drawn, which does not require the
supplementation and corrective of some other constituents,
more fully represented in other souls of possibly lower
sanctity.
Thus each soul and grade requires all the others; and
thus the measure of a soul's greatness is not its possessing
things which cannot, in any degree or way, be found in, or
expected of, all human souls, in proportion as they are fully
and characteristically human, but, on the contrary, its being
full of a spirit and a force which, in different degrees and
forms, are the very salt and yeast, the very light and life, of
all men in every place and time.
The following weighty declaration, long ascribed to St.
Thomas Aquinas, fully covers, I think, the doctrine and
ideal aimed at throughout this section: "Already in this life
152 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
we ought continuously to enjoy God, as a thing most fully
our own, in all our works. . . . Great is the blindness and
exceeding the folly of many souls that are ever seeking God,
continuously sighing after God, and frequently desiring God:
whilst, all the time, they are themselves the tabernacles of the
living God . . . since their soul is the seat of God, in which
He continuously reposes. Now who but a fool deliberately
seeks a tool which he possesses under lock and key? or who
can use and profit by an instrument which he is seeking? or
who can draw comfort from food for which he hungers, but
which he does not relish at leisure? Like unto all this is the
life of many a just soul, which ever seeks God and never
tarries to enjoy Him; and all the works of such an one are,
on this account, less perfect." 1
IV. PURE LOVE, OR DISINTERESTED RELIGIO
: ITS
DISTINCTION FROM QUIETISM.
The problem of Pure Love, of Disinterested Religion, can
hardly, in practice, be distinguished from that of Quiet and
Passivity, if only because Quietists, (those who have con-
sidered perfection to diminish more and more the number of
the soul's acts, or at least to eliminate more and more the
need of distinctness or difference between them,) have, quite
inevitably, ever given a special prominence to the question as
to what should be the character of those few acts, of that
one unbroken act. For once allow this their main question
we should all have to answer in the Quietist's way,-viz. that
this single act must, for a perfect soul, be the most perfect
of the acts possible to man, and hence must be an act of
Pure Love.- Yet it is well to realize clearly that, if Quietism
necessitates an even excessive and unreal doctrine of Pure
Love, a moderate and solid Pure-Love teaching has no kind
of necessary connection with Quietism. For even though
my interior life be necessarily one continuous stream and
tissue of acts, countless in their number, variety, and degrees
of interpenetration, it in nowise follows that acts of Pure
Love are not the best, or are impossible; nor that, in pro-
portion as Pure Love infonns the soul's multiform acts, such
acts must lose in depth and delicacy of variety and articu-
1 De Beatitudine. c. 3. 3.
LESS ULTIMATE THIS-WORLD DOCTRINES 153
lation. Indeed here, with regard to the very culmination
of the interior life, we shall again find and must again test
the two conceptions: the finally abstractive and materially
simplifying one, which must ever have anyone real thing
outside of another; and the incarnational and synthetic one,
which finds spiritual realities and forces working the one
inside and through the other. And the latter view will
appear the true one.
I. New Testanzent teaching as to Pure Love.
N ow we must first try and get some clear ideas as to how
this difficult matter stands in the New Testament,-in the
Synoptic tradition and in the Pauline- ] ohannine teaching re-
spectively. Here again it is the former which, (though on its
surface it appears as the more ordinary and the more locally
coloured teaching,) is the richer, in its grandly elastic and
manifold simplicity; and it is the latter which has most
profoundly penetrated and articulated the ultimate meaning
and genius of a part of Our Lord's doctrine, yet at the cost
of a certain narrowing of the variety and breadth of that
outlook. In both. cases I shall move, from the easier and
more popular teaching, to the deepest and most original
enunciations and explanations.!
(I) The Synoptic teaching starts throughout from the
ordinary post-exilic Jewish feeling and teaching, which indeed
recognizes the ceremonial obligations and the more tangible
amongst the ethical demands as standing under the cate-
gorical inperative of the Legal H Thou Shalt," but places the
large territory of the finer moral precepts outside of the La\v.
So with the H Zedakah," the " Justice" of almsdeeds, and with
the H Gemiluth Chasadim," the H works of lnercy," such as
visiting the sick, burying the dead, and rejoicing with the
joyful and sorrowing \vith the sorrowful. Thus Rabbi Simon
the Just tells us: "The world rests on three things: on the
Law (Thorah), on Worship (A bodah) , and on Works of
Mercy (Gemiluth Chasad'inz) "; and Rabbi Eleazar declared
the" Gemiluth Chasadim " to be above the" Zedakah." 2 And
it is especially in view of these works of supererogation that
rewards, and indeed a strict scale of rewards, are conceived.
1 I have been much helped in my own direct studies of the sources by
W. Bousset's D'ie Religz"on des judenthums im NeutestamentUchen Zeitalter.
19 0 3; by H. J. HoItzmann's Neutestamentliche Theologie. 1897; and A.
Jülicher's Gleichnissreden jesu. Theil 2. 1899.
I Bousset. pp. 395. 396.
154 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
Thus already in the Book of Tobit, (written somewhere
between 175 and 25 B.C.,) we have Tobit instructing his son
Tobias that " Prayer is good with Fasting and Alms, more
than to buy up treasures of gold. For Alms delivereth
from death. . . they that practise Mercy and Justice
shall live long." 1 And one of the sayings of the Jewish
Fathers declares: U So much trouble, so much reward." 2
Now this whole scheme and its spirit seems, at first sight,
to be taken over quite unchanged by Our Lord. The very
Beatitudes end with: U Rejoice. . . because your reward is
great in heaven." And, in the following Sermon,his hearers are
bidden to beware of doing their It Zedakah," -the It Justice "
of Prayer, Fasting, Almsdeeds in order to be seen by men;
since, in that case, It ye shall not ha ve reward from your
Father \Vho is in heaven." And this is driven home in
detail: these three kinds of Justice are to be done It in
secret," and It thy Father will repay thee." Even Prayer itself
thus appears as a meritorious good work, one of the means
to U treasure up treasures in heaven." Similarly, the rich man
is bid U Go sell whatsoever thou hast and give to the poor;
and thou shalt have a treasure in heaven." Even U he that
shall give you a cup of cold water in l\Iy name, shall not lose
his reward." Indeed we have the general principle, "the
labourer is worthy of his hire." 3
And yet we can follow the delicate indications of the
presence, and the transitions to the expression, of the deeper
apprehension and truth. For, on the part of God, the reward
appears, in the first instance, as in intrinsic relation to the
deed. The reward is thedeed'scongenitalequivalent: 'c Blessed
are the merciful, for they shan obtain mercy"; "if ye forgive
men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also for-
give you"; and U everyone who shall confess Me before
men, him will I also confess before l\1y Father Who is
in heaven." 4. Ox the reward appears as a just inversion of
the ordinary results of the action thus rewarded: "Blessed are
the meek: for they shall inherit the earth"; take the highest
seat at a banquet, and you will be forced down to the lowest,
take the lowest, and you win be moved up to the highest;
and, generally, "he that findeth his life, shall lose it; and
1 Ch. xii, 8, 9; see too ch. ii, 2. 7.
21 Pirke Aboth, v, 23.
3 Matt. v; 12; vi. 4, 6, 18. 20; l\Iark x, 21; ix, 41; Luke x, 7.
.. Matt. v. 7; vi, 14; x. 32.
LESS ULTIl\iATE THIS-WORLD DOCTRINES 155
he that loseth his life for My sake shall find it." 1 Or the
reward appears as an effect organicaIly connected with the
deed, as its cause or condition: "Blessed are the pure of
heart: for they shall see God." 2 And then the reward comes
to vary, although the deed remains quantitatively identIcal,
solely because of that deed's qualitative difference, i.e.
according to the variation in its motive: "He that receiveth a
prophet in the name of a prophet shall receive a prophet's
reward; and he that receiveth a righteous man in the name
of a righteous man shall receive a righteous man's reward." 3
And then the reward moves up and up and becomes a grace,
through being so far in excess of the work done: II Everyone
who hath left houses. . . or father. . . or children, or lands for
My name's sake, shall receive" manifold, indeed" a hundred-
fold "-" a full. . . and overflowing measure shall they pour
into your lap"; and " whosoever shan humble himself, shall
be exalted,"-not simply back to his original level, but into
the Kingdom of Heaven. So, too, " Thou hast been faithful
over a few things, I will set thee over many things" ; indeed
this faithful servant's master " shall place him over all his
possessions; " or rather, " blessed are those servants whom the
Lord, when He cometh, shall find watching: verily I say
unto you, that he shall gird himself . . . and shall come and
serve them." 4
This immense disproportion between the work and its
reward, and the consequent grace-character of the latter, is
driven home with a purposely paradoxical, provocative
pointedness, in the two Parables of the \Vedding Garment
and of the Equal Payment of the Unequal Labourers, both of
which are in St. Matthew alone. The former concerns the
soul's call to the kingdom, and that soul's response. The
King here, after having formally invited a certain select
number of previously \-varned relatives and nobles, who all, as
such, had a claim upon him (
Iatt. xxii, 3), sends out invita-
tions with absolute indiscrimination,-to men with no claims
or with less than none; to " bad" as well as "good." And
it is the l{ing, again, who gratuitously suppJies them each
with the appropriate white wedding-feast garment. He has
thus a double right to expect all his guests to be thus clothed,
1 Matt. v, 5; Luke xiv, 8-11; Matt. x. 39.
2 l\1att. v, 8. 3 Matt. x. 41.
, Matt. xix. 29; Mark x. 23; Luke vi. 38; Matt. xxiii, 12; xxv. 21;
xxiv. 47; Luke xii, 37.
--
15 6 THE MYSTICAL ELElVIENT OF RELIGION
and to punish instantly, not the mere negligence, but the
active rejection implied on the part of the man clothed in
his ordinary clothing (vv. II, 12). Both call and investiture
have been here throughout pure graces, which rendered
possible, and which invited but did not force, an acceptance.!
The second Parable describes the" Householder" who hired
labourers for his vineyard at the first, third, sixth, ninth, and
even eleventh hour,-each and all of them for a penny a day;
\vho actually pays out to them, at the end of the day, this one
identical pay; and who, to the labourer of the first shift who
complains, It These last have spent but one hour, and thou
hast n1ade them equal unto us, which have borne the burden
and heat of the day," declares, " Friend, I do thee no wrong:
didst thou not agree with me for a penny? Take up that
\vhich is thine, and go thy way: it is my will to give unto this
last even as unto thee. Is it not lawful for me to do what I will
with mine own? or is thine eye evil (art thou envious) because I
am good" (because I choose to be bountiful) ? (Matt. xx, I-IS).
Here again the overflowing generosity of God's grace is brought
home to us, as operating according to other standards than
those of ordinary daily life: nor is this operation unjust, for
the Householder paid their due to the first set of workers,
whilst rewarding, far above their worth, those poor labourers
of the last hour. But, as Jülicher well points out, " we should
not pedantically insist upon finding here a doctrine of the
strict equality of souls in the Beyond-a doctrine contra-
dicted by other declarations of Jesus. Only the claÙn of
single groups of souls to preferential treatment is combated
here . . .: a certain fundamental religious disposition is to
be awakened." And, as Bugge rightly notes, "the great
supreme conception which lies at the bottom of the parable
has, parablewise, remained here unnamed: Paul has found
the expressive term for it,-' Grace.' "2
And we get corresponding, increasingly spiritual interpre-
tations with regard to man's action and man's merit. First,
all ostentation in the doing of the deed cancels all reward in
the Beyond; so, in the case of each of the three branches of
" Justice." 3 And then the worker is to be satisfied, day by
1 Interesting reasons and parallels for holding the Wedding Garment
to have been the gift of the King, in Bugge's Die Haupt-Parabeln ]esu,
19 00 , pp. 3 16 , 3 1 7.
2 ]ülicher, Ope cit. p. 467. Bugge, Ope cit. p. 277.
I Matt. vi, I. 2. 5. 16.
LESS ULTIMATE THIS-WORLD DOCTRINES 157
day, with that day's pay and sustenance: It Give us this day
our daily bread," every soul is to pray; the divine House-
holder will say, " Didst thou not agree with me for a penny?
Take up that which is thine and go thy \vay." And even
"when ye shall have done all the things that are commanded
you, say, 'We are unprofitable servants, we have done that
which it was our duty to do.'" They are invited to look away
from self, to H seek ye first His Kingdom and His righteous-
ness," and then II all these things," their very necessaries for
earthly life, "shall be added unto you." Indeed it is the
boundlessly generous self-communicativeness of God Himself
which is to be His disciples' deliberate ideal, "be ye perfect, as
your heavenly Father is perfect"; and the production of this
likeness within themselves is to be the ultimate end and crown
of their most heroic, most costly acts: H love your enemies, and
pray for them that persecute you: that you may be sons of
your Father which is in Heaven: for He maketh His sun to
rise on the evil and the good, and sendeth rain upon the just
and the unjust." And the more there is of such self-oblivious
love, the more \vill even the gravest sins be entirely blotted
out, and the more rapid will be the full sanctification of the
soul, as Our Lord solemnly declares concerning the sinful
woman in St. Luke, "her sins, which are many, are forgiven;
because she loved much." 1
In all this matter it is St. Luke's Gospel which is specially
interesting as showing, so to speak, side by side, an increased
Rabbinical-like preciseness of balance between work and
reward, and yet the adoption, doubtlessly under Pauline
influence, of 51. Paul's central term in lieu of the old Jewish
terminology. For, in one of its curious so-called H Ebionite "
passages, this Gospel works up the Parable of the Talents,
\vith its only approximate relation between the deeds and
their rewards (Matt. xxv, 14-30), into the Parable of the
Pounds (Luke xix, 12-27), with its mathematically sym-
metrical interdependence between the quantities of the merit
and those of this merit's reward: the man who makes ten
1 Matt. vi, I I; xx, 14; Luke xvii, 10; Matt. vi. 33; v, 4 8 . 44. 45; Luke
vii. 47. It seems plain that the Parable of the Two Debtors, which
appears in this last passage. declares how pardon awakens love; and
that the sinful woman's act and Our Lord's direct comment on it, which
are now made to serve as that Parable's frame. demonstrate how love
pIoduces pardon. In my text I have been busy only with the second of
these twin truths.
...
158 THE MYSTICAL ELEl\IENT OF RELIGION
pounds is placed over ten cities, and he who makes five,
over five. And, on the other hand, in a Lukan equivalent
for part of the Sermon on the Mount, St. Matthew's (( reward"
is replaced by" grace": "If ye do good to them that do good
to you, what thank (xáetç) have you? . . . and if ye lend to
them of whom ye hope to receive, what thank have you?" 1
(2) St. Paul indeed it is who, in the specially characteristic
portions of his teaching, unfolds, by means of a partly original
terminology, the deepest motives and implications of Our
Lord's own divinely deep sayings and doings, and never
wearies of insisting upon the Grace-character of the soul's
call and salvation,-the Free Mercy, the Pure Love which
God shows to us, and the sheer dependence and complete
self-donation, the pure love which we owe to Him, and which,
at the soul's best, it can and does give Him.
It is true that in the contrasting, the traditional layer of his
teaching, we find the old ] ewish terminology still intact:
" God will render unto every man according to his works";
"we must all be made manifest before the Judgment-seat of
Christ; that each one may receive. . . according to what he
hath done, \vhether it be good or bad." 2 Indeed it is precisely
in St. Paul's pages that we find the two most difficult and, at
first sight, least spiritual sayings concerning this matter to be
discovered in the whole New Testament: "If in this life only
we have hoped in Christ, we are of all men most pitiable."
And: "If the dead are not raised . . . let us eat and drink, for
to-morrow we die." 3 But these two passages must doubtless
be taken partly as arguments adapted to the dispositions of
his hearers,-the " Let us eat and drink" conclusion is given
in the words of a current Heathen Greek proverb,-and, still
more, as expressions not so much of a formal doctrine as of
a mood, of one out of the many intense, mutually supple-
mentary and corrective moods of that rich nature.
According to his own deepest, most deliberate, and most
systematic teaching, it is the life of Christ, the living Christ,
energizing even now within the faithful soul, that constitutes
both the primary source and the ultimate motive of Christian
sanctity. " I have been crucified with Christ; yet I live; and
yet no longer I, but Christ liveth in me." And through this
divine-human life within us (( we faint not; but though our out-
\vard man is decaying, yet our inward man is renewed day by
1 Luke vi, 33. 34. 2 Rom. ii, 6; 2 Cor. v. 10.
a I Cor. xv, 19, 32.
LESS ULTIThIATE THIS-WORLD DOCTRINES 159
day." Indeed the Lord Himself said to him: "M Y grace is
sufficient for thee; for My power is made perfect in weakness" ;
and hence he, Paul, could declare: "Gladly therefore will I
glory in my weaknesses, that the strength of Christ may rest
upon me." And thus, with Christ living within him, he can
exclaim: " If God is for us , who is against us? . . . \ Vho shall
separate us from the love of Christ? shall tribulation, or
anguish, . . . or the sword? . . . In an these things we are
more than conquerors, through Him that loved us. For I am
persuaded that neither death, nor life . . . nor things present
nor things to come . . . shall be able to separate us from the
love of God." "Whether we live therefore, or die, we are the
Lord's." 1 We thus get here a reinsistence upon, and a further
deepening of, perhaps the profoundest utterance of the whole
Old Testament: "What have I in Heaven besides Thee? and
besides Thee I seek nothing upon earth. Even though my
flesh and my heart faint, Thou art my rock and my portion
for ever." 2
And then that deathless hymn to Pure Love, the thirteenth
chapter of the First Epistle to the Corinthians, not only
culminates with the proclamation that, of all man can hope
and wish and will and do, of all his doings and his graces,
" but now abideth Faith, Hope, Love, (Charity) these three:
and the greatest of these is Love (Charity)." But the Love that
has this primacy is Pure Love, for" it seeketh not its own."
And though of this Love alone it is said that" it never
passeth away," ever persists in the Beyond: yet even here
already it can and does get exercised,-and this, not only
without any suppression of parallel acts of the other virtues,
but with these other virtues and their specific motives now
taken over and deepened, each in its special characteristic,
by the supreme virtue and motive of Pure Love: "Love
beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things." 3
Thus Faith, Hope, Patience, and all the other virtues, they all
remain, but it is Love that is now the ultimate motive of all
their specific motives. These, his culminating teachings,
indicate clearly enough that virtue's rewards are regarded by
him, ultimately and substantially, as " the wages of going on
and not to die"; or rather that they are, in their essence,
manifestations of that Eternal Life which is already energizing
within souls that earnestly seek God, even here and now.
1 Gal. ii, 20; 2 Cor. iv, 16; xii, 9; Rom. viii, 31, 35, 37-39; xiv, 8.
a Ps. Ix xiii (lxxii), v, 25. I follow Duhm's restoration of the text.
3 I Cor. xiii, 13; 8, 7.
..
160 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT O:F RELIGION
This Life, then, however great may be its further expansion
and the soul's consciousness of possessing it, already holds
within itself sufficient, indeed abundant motives, (in the fulfil-
ment of its own deepest nature and of its now awakened
requirements of hannony, strength, and peace through self-
donation,) for giving itself ever more and more to God.
(3) And with regard to the ] ohannine teaching, it will be
enough for us to refer back to the texts discussed in the
preceding chapter, and to note how large and specially
characteristic is here the current which insists upon the
reward being already, at least inchoatively, enclosed in the
deed itself, and upon this deed being the result and expression
of Eternal Life operating within the faithful soul, even already,
Here and Now. Only the declaration that" perfect love
casteth out fear," that it does not tolerate fear alongside of
itself, I John iv, I8, appears to be contrary to the Pauline
doctrine that Perfect Love, " Love" itself" beareth all things,
believeth, hopeth, endureth all things," I Cor. xiii. 7. Love
then can animate other virtues: why not then a holy fear?
But this J ohannine saying seems in fact modelled upon St.
Paul's quotation and use of a passage from the Septuagint:
" Cast out the bondwoman (the slave-servant) and her son, for
the son of the bondwoman shall not be heir together with
the son of the free," Gal. iv, 30; and hence this saying will
not exclude" children of the free-woman,"-a holy fear as
well as faith, hope, patience,-but only "children of the
slave-woman," superstition, presumption, weakmindedness,
and slavish fear.
2. The" Pure Love" controversy.
In turning now to the controversy as to Pure Love
(r694-1699) and its assured results, we shall have again to
distinguish carefully between the lives and intentions of the
writers who were censured, and the doctrines, analytic or
systematic, taught or implied by them, which were condemned.
I'his distinction is easier in this case than in that of Quietisnl,
for the chief writer concerned here is Fénelon, as to whose
pure and spiritual character and deeply Catholic intentions
there never has been any serious doubt.
But in this instance we have to make a further distinction
-viz. between the objective drift of at least part of his
ExPlication des M axÙnes des Saints sur la Vie lntérieure,
published in r697,and especially the twenty-three propositions
extracted from it which were condemned by Pope Innocent
LESS ULTI1vIATE THIS-WORLD DOCTRINES 161
XII in 1699; and the teaching which he increasingly clarified
and improved in his numerous apologetic writings against
Bossuet and other opponents in this memorable controversy-
especially in his Latin writings, intended for transmission to
the Pope, and written as late as 1710 and 1712.1 It is certain
that Bishops and theologians who opposed his Maximes
were found warmly endorsing such pieces as his wonderfully
clear and sober Prenlière RéPonse aux Ditficultés de M.l'Evêque
de Chartres. It is these pieces, comprising also his remarkably
rich Instruction Pastorale, his admirably penetrating Lettre
sur [' Oraison Passive and Lettre sur la C harité, and his
extraordinarily compact and balanced Second Epistle to
Pope Clement XI, 1712 (where all the censured ambiguities
and expressions are carefully avoided), which alone among
Fénelon's writings shall be accepted in what follows. 2
Indeed even the earlier of these writings fail in but one
thing-in justifying the actual text of the condemned book,
as distinguished from the intentions of its writer. Bishop
Hedley sums up the real position with the treble authority
of a spiritually trained Monk, of a practised theological writer,
and of a Catholic Bishop of long experience: "The doctrine
intended by Fénelon, in his Maximes des Saints, and as
explained by him during his controversy with Bossuet, has
never been censured, although the opposite party laboured
hard for its condemnation. Fifteen .years after the con-
demna tion of his book, we find him re-sta ting to Pope
Clement XI (who, as Cardinal, had drawn up the Brief of his
condemnations), in careful scholastic language the doctrine
intended by himself, but which he himself had mis-stated
in his popular treatise. As there were errors, the other side,
whatever the crudity or novelty of some of its contentions,
whatever its motives or methods-and some of them were
far from creditable-was sure in the end to succeed. And it
is well that it should have succeeded as far as it did succeed." 3
In any case, we shall have to beware of considering Bossuet's
contentions as to the specific character of Charity, Love, and
as to the possibility, for man here below, of single acts of pure
love, to be representative of the ordinary Catholic teaching
1 æuvres, ed. Versailles, 1820, Vols. IV to IX.
2 RéPonse: æuvres, Vol. IV, pp. 119-132; Instruction: ibid. pp. 18r-
308; Lettre sur l'Oraison, Vol. VIII, pp. 3-82; Lettre SUI' la Charité.
Vol. IX, pp. 3-36; EPistola II, ibid. pp. 617-677.
I The SPiritual Letters of Fénelon, London, 1892. Vol. I, pp. xi, xii.
VOL. II. M
162 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
either before or since the condemnation. On both these
fundamental points Fénelon's positions are demonstrably,
and indeed have been generally admitted to be, a mere
re-statement of that teaching, as is shown, for instance, in the
Jesuit Father Deharbe'ssolid and sober, thoroughly traditional
and highly authorized essay: Die vollkommeneLiebe Gottes . . .
dargestellt nach der Lehre des h. Thomas von A quin, Regens-
burg, 1856. It is this most useful treatise and the admirable
Analyse Raisonnée de la Controverse d'll Quiétisme of the Abbé
Gosselin,l (which has already much helped me in the preceding
section,) that have been my chief aids in my careful study,
back through Bossuet and Fénelon, to St. Thomas and his
chief commentators, Sylvius, who died in 1649, and Cardinal
Cajetan, who died in 1534, and to the other chief authorities
beyond them.-I group the main points, which alone need
concern us here, under three heads: the specific Nature of
Pure Love; single Acts of Pure Love; a State of Pure Love.
(I) Now as to the specific Nature of Charity, or Pure, Perfect
Love, St. Thomas tells us: "One Kind of Love is perfect,
the other kind is imperfect. Perfect Love is that wherewith
a man is loved for his own sake: as, for instance, when
some one wishes well to another person, for that other person's
sake, in the manner in which a man loves his friend.
Imperfect love is the love wherewith a man loves something,
not for its own sake, but in order that this good thing may
accrue to himself,-in the manner in which a man loves a
thing that he covets. Now the forDler kind of love pertains
to Charity, which clings to God for His own sake, whereas it
is Hope that pertains to the second kind of love, since he
who hopes aims at obtaining something for himself." 2 And
Cardinal Cajetan explains that this wishing well to God}
" this good that we can will God to have, is double. The
good that is in Him, that (strictly speaking) is God Himself,-
we can, by Love, will Him to have it, when we find our
delight in God being what He is. And the good that is but
referred to God,-His honour and Kingdom and the Obedience
we owe him,-this we can will, not only by finding our
pleasure in it, but by labouring at its maintenance and
increase with all our n1Ïght." 3
And, says St. Thomas, such Perfect Love alone is Love in
1 ffiuvres de Fénelon, ed. 1820, Vol. IV, pp. lxxix-ccxxxiv.
:& Summa Theologica, II, ii, quo 17, art. 8. in corp.
· Comment in II, ii, quo 23, art. I.
LESS ULTIMATE THIS-WORLD DOCTRINES r63
its strict sense and" the most excellent of all the virtues" : for
" ever that which exists for its own sake is greater than that
which exists in view of something else. Now Faith and Hope
attain indeed to God, yet as the source from which there
accrue to us the knowledge of the Truth and the acquisition
of the Good; whilst Love attains to God Himself, with a view
to abide in Him, and not that some advantage may accrue
to us from Him." And perhaps still more clearly: "When a
man loves something so as to covet it, he apprehends it as
something pertaining to his own well-being. The lover here
stands towards the object beloved, as towards something
which is his property." 1 And note how, although he teaches
that whereas" the beatitude of man, as regards its cause and
its object, is something increate," i. e. God Himself, "the
essence of the beatitude itself is something created," for" men
are rendered blessed by participation, and this participation
in beatitude is something created" : yet he is careful to explain
some of his more incidental passages, in which he speaks
of this essence of beatitude as itself man's end, by the ex
professo declaration: "God" alone" is man's ultimate end,
and beatitude is only as it were an end before the very end, an
end in immediate proximity to the ultimate end." 2
(2) And next, as to the possibility, actual occurrence and
desirableness of single Acts of such Pure Love, even here
below: all this is assumed as a matter of course throughout
St. Thomas's ex professo teaching on the matter. For through-
out the passages concerning the Nature of Pure Love he is
not exclusively, indeed not even primarily, busy with man's
acts in the future life, but with the respective characteristics
of man's various acts as executed and as analyzable, more
or less perfectly, already here belo\v. And nowhere does he
warn us against concluding, from his reiterated insistence
upon the essential characteristics of Pure Love, that such
love cannot, as a matter of fact, be practised, at least in
single acts, here below at all. Hence it is clear that, accord-
ing to him, the soul as it advances in perfection will-along-
side of acts of supernatural Faith, Hope, Fear, etc. (and the
production of such acts will never cease), produce more and
more acts of Pure Love: not necessarily more, as compared
1 Summa, II, ii, quo 23, art. 6, cone!., et in corp.; I, ii, quo 28, art. I, in
corp., et ad 2. See also II, ii. quo 17. art. 6. in corp.; quo 28, art. I ad 3;
I, ii, quo 28, art. I, in corp., et ad 2.
I In Libr. sent. IV, dist. 49, art. 2.
164 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
with the other kinds of contemporary acts, but certainly more
as compared with its former acts of the same character.
But there is a further, profoundly and delicately experienced
doctrine. Not only can Pure Love be exercised in single and
simple acts, alongside of single and simple acts of other kinds
of virtues, supernatural or otherwise: but Pure Love can itself
come to command or to inform acts which in themselves bear,
and will now bear in increased degree, the characteristics of
the other kinds of acts. St. Thomas tells us, with admirable
clearness: "An act can be derived from Charity in one of two
ways. In the first way, the act is elicited by Charity itself, and
such a virtuous act requires no other virtue beside Charity,-
as in the case of loving the Good, rejoicing in it, and mourning
over its opposite. In the second way, an act proceeds from
Charity in the sense of being commanded by it: and in this
manner,-since Charity" has the full range of and" commands
all the virtues, as ordering them (each and all) to their (ulti-
mate) end,-an act can proceed from Charity whilst neverthe-
less belonging to any other special virtue." And he assures us
that: "The merit of eternallife," " the fountain-head of merit-
ing," " pertains primarily to, consists in Charity, and pertains
to and consists in other kinds of supernatural acts in only a
secondary manner,-that is, only in so far as these acts are
commanded or informed by Charity" or Pure Love.!
Let us take some instances of such two-fold manifestations
of identical motives and virtues, according as these motives
and virtues operate in simple co-ordination, or within a com-
pound and organic system. In the scholar's life, Greek and
Latin and Hebrew may be acquired, each simply for its own
sake and each alongside of the other; or they can be acquired,
from the immediate motive indeed of knowing each in its own
specific nature as thoroughly as possible, yet with the ultimate,
ever more and more conscious and all-penetrating, motive of
thus acquiring means and materials for the science of lan-
guage, or for the study of philosophy, or for research into
early phases of the Jewish-Christian religion. In the family
life, a man, woman, or child can live for himself or herself,
and then for his or her other immediate relatives, each
taken as separate alongside of the other, or he or she may
get more and more dominated by the conception and claims
of the family as an organic whole, and may end by working
1 Summa Theol.. III. quo 85, art. 2 ad I; I, ii, quo 114, art. 4, in corp.
In Libr. sent. III, dist. 30. art. 5.
LESS UJ..TII\IATE THIS-WORLD DOCTRINES 165
largely, even with respect to himself, as but for so many con-
stituents of that larger organism in which alone each part
can attain its fullest significance. And especially a young
mother can live for her own health and joys, and then, along-
side of these, for those of her child, or she can get to the
point of sustaining her own physical health and her mental
hopes and will to live as so many means and conditions for
feeding and fostering the claimful body and soul of her child.
So again, in the creatively artistic life, we can have a Dante
writing prose and poetry and painting a picture, and a Rafae]
painting pictures and writing sonnets; or we can have
Wagner bringing all his activities of scholar, poet, painter,
musician, stage-manager,-each retaining, and indeed in-
definitely increasing, its specific character and capabilities,-
to contribute, by endless mutual stimulation and interaction,
to something other and greater than anyone of them
individually or even than the simple addition of then1 aU,-
to a great rvlusic-Drama and multiform yet intensely unified
image of life itself. And an organist can draw out, as he
plays, the Vox Humana stop, and then another and another
limitedly efficacious organ-stop, whilst each new-comer takes
the place of its predecessor or a place beside it; or he can
draw out the Grand J eu stop, which sets all the other stops to
work in endless interaction, with itself permeating and organiz-
ing the whole. We thus, in these and countless other cases,
and in every variety of degree within each case, get two kinds
of variety, what we may call the simple and the compound
diversification. And everywhere we can find that the richest
variety not only can coexist with, but that it requires and is
required by, indeed that it is a necessary constituent and
occasion of, the deepest and most delicate unity.1
(3) And finally, as to a State of Pure Love. Only here do
we reach the class of questions to which the condemnations
of Fénelon really apply.
'-tVe shall do well to begin by bearing in mind the very
ancient, practically unbroken, very orthodox Christian dis-
crimination of faithful souls,-sometimes into the two classes
of Mercenaries (or Slaves) and Friends or Children, the latter
1 Some of the finest descriptions of these profoundly organized states
common. in some degrees and forms. to all mankind. are to be found in
the tenth and eleventh books of St. Augustine's Confessions. A.D. 397. and
in Henri Bergson's Essai sur les Données I mmédiates de la Conscience.
1 8 98.
166 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
of whom the great Clement of Alexandria, who died about
A.D. 215, called" Gnostics," " Gnosis " being his term for per-
fection (this scheme is the one to which Catherine's life and
teaching conform); or into the three classes of Servants
(Slaves); l'tlercenaries; and Friends (or Children), as is
already worked out with full explicitness by Saints Basil,
Gregory of Nazianzum, and Gregory of Nyssa, ,vho died in the
years 379, 3 8 9, and 395 ( ?) respectively. Now Clement places
the Mercenary on the left of the Sanctuary, but the" Gnostic"
on the right; and, whilst declaring that the former" are those
who, by means of renouncing things perishable, hope to
receive the goods of incorruption in exchange," he demands of
the "Gnostic" that "he approach the saving word neither from
the fear of punishment, nor from the motive of reward, but
simply because He is good." 1 And St. Basil, echoed in this by
his two contemporaries, teaches that, "We obey God and avoid
vices, from the fear of punishment, and in that case we take
on the resemblance of Slaves. Or we keep the precepts,
because of the utility that we derive from the recompense,
thus resembling Mercenaries. Or finally, from love of Him
who has given us the law, we obey with joy at having been
judged worthy of serving so great and good a God, and thus
we imitate the affection of Children to\vards their parents." 2
And, in the case of all these Fathers, it is clear that, not only
single acts, but whole states of soul and life are meant.
But the increased fineness in the analy
is of interior experi-
ences and dispositions has since then required, and the Church
formulations have most wisely demanded, that these three
classes be not so sharply distinguished as to make anyone
soul seem exclusively and unchangeably to pertain to anyone
of them; and, still more, that these three divisions be taken to
represent, even \vhere and whilst they are most completely
realized, only the predominant character of the majority of
the acts constituting the respective state of soul. For it is
clear that not only is there, and can there be, no such thing,
on earth at least, as a state composed of one unrepeated act;
but there is no such thing as a condition of soul made up
solely of acts of" simple" Pure Love, or even of supernatural
acts of all sorts commanded throughout by Charity, or indeed
solely of supernatural acts, both simple and commanded.
The" One-act" state is a chimera; the state of" simple" acts
1 Stromata, Book IV. ch. vi. 30, I; ch. iv. 15. 6.
I Proemium in Reg. Fus. Tract. n. 3. Vol. II. pp. 329. 33 0 .
LESS ULTIMATE THIS-WORLD DOCTRINES 167
of Pure Love alone would, if possible, involve the neglect of
numberless other virtues and duties; and the last two states
are indeed higWy desirable, but it would be fanaticism to
think \ve could completely attain to them here below.
Yet there is nothing in any Church-censure to prevent,
and there is much in the teaching and life of countless saints
to invite, our holding the possibility, hence the working ideal
and standard, for even here below, of a state in which two
kinds of acts, which are still good in their degree, would be in
a considerable minority: acts of merely natural, unspiritualized
hope, fear, desire, etc.; and acts of supernatural hope, fear,
desire, etc., in so far as not commanded by Charity. For even
in this state not fully deliberate venial sins would occasionally
be committed, far more would a certain number of acts of an
unspiritualized, unsuperna tural kind occur. And the necessary
variety among the supernatural acts would in nowise be
impaired,-it would indeed be greatly stimulated, by Pure
Love being now, for the most part, the ultimate motive of
their exercise.
Sylvius, in his highly authoritative commentary on St.
Thomas, puts the matter admirably: "We may not love God
in view of reward in suchwise as to make eternal life the
true and ultimate end of our love, or to love God because
of it, so that without the reward we would not love Him
. . . We must love God with reference to the eternal reward
in suchwise that we put forth indeed both love and good
works in view of such beatitude,-in so far as the latter is the
end proposed to these works by God Himself; yet that
we subordinate this our beatitude to the love of God as the
true and ultimate end," so that U if we had no beatitude to
expect at all, we should nevertheless still love Him and
execute good works for His own sake alone. In this manner
we shall first love God above all things and for His own sake;
and we shall next keep the eternal reward before us, for the
sake of God and of His honour." 1 A man in these dispositions
would still hope, and desire, and fear, and regret, and strive
for, and aspire to conditions, things, persons both of earth
and of the beyond, both for himself and for others, both for
time and for eternity: but all this, for the most part, from the
ultimate motive, penetrating, deepening, unifying all the other
motives,-of the love of Love, Christ, Spirit, God.
1 Summa Theol., II. ii. quo 27, art. 3.
168 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
Any hesitation to accept the reality or possibility of such a
state cannot, then, be based upon such acceptance involving
any kind of Quietism, but simply on the admittedly great
elevation of such a condition. Yet this latter objection seems
to be sufficiently met if we continuously insist that even such
a state neither exempts souls from the commission of (more
or less deliberate) venial sin; nor is ever entirely equable; nor
is incapable of being completely lost; nor, as we have just
contended, is ever without more or less numerous acts of an
unsupernaturalized kind, and still less without acts of the
supernatural virtues other than Love and unprompted by
Love.
And all fear of fanaticism will be finally removed by a further
most necessary and grandly enlarging insistence upon the
Mercenaries and even the Servants having passing moments,
and producing varyingly numerous single acts, of Pure Love
and of the other supernatural virtues prompted by Pure Love.
All souls in a state of Grace throughout God's wide wide
world,-every constituent, however slight and recent, of the
great soul of the Church throughout every sex, age, race,
clime, and external organization, would thus have some
touches, some at least incidental beginnings of Pure Love, and
of the other supernatural virtues prompted by Pure Love.
All souls would thus, in proportion to their degree of grace
and of fidelity, have some of those touches; and the progress
of all would consist in the degree to which that variety of acts
would become informed and commanded by the supreme
motive of all motives, Pure and Perfect Love. 1
And with such an Ideal, required by fundamental Catholic
positions, ever increasingly actuating the soul and binding it
to all souls beneath, around, above it, what there is of truth in
the savage attacks of Spinoza and of Kant and of such recent
1 The obligation for all of acts of Pure Love is clearly taught by the
condemnations, passed by Popes Alexander VII and Innocent XI, upon
the opposite contention, in 1665 and 16 79: II Homo nullo unquam vitae
suae tempore tenetur elicere actum Fidei, Spei et Charitatis, ex vi prae-
ceptorum divinorum ad eas virtutes pertinentium:' Note here how
.. Charitas .; necessarily means Pure Love, since Imperfect Love has already
been mentioned in II Spes."-" Probabile est, ne singulis quidem rigorose
quinquennüs per se obligare praeceptum charitatis erga Deum. Tunc
solum obligat, quando tenemur justificari et non habemus aliam viam
qua justificari possumus." Here Pure Love is undoubtedly meant by
II Charitas," since. outside of the use of the sacraments, Pure Love alone
justifies.
LESS ULTIMATE THIS-WORLD DOCTRINES 169
writers as A. E. Taylor,l upon the supposed hypocritical
self-seeking in the practice and temper of average Christians,
would lose all its force.
3. Cognate Problems.
Three much-discussed cognate matters require some
elucidation here. They answer to the questions: Does
reference to the self, as for instance in acts of gratitude and
thanksgiving, prevent an act from being one of Pure Love?
Is the pleasurableness, normally ever attached and subsequent
to all virtuous acts, to be regarded as part of the reward from
\vhich Pure Love abstracts? And finally are, I will not say
any technically ecstatic or other in part psycho-physical
peculiarities and manifestations, but even active Contempla-
tion or the simple Prayer of Quiet, necessary conditions or
expressions of a state of Pure Love,-understood in the sense
explained above?
(I) As to reference to the self, it is highly important to dis-
tinguish between acts of Pure Love, and attempts, by means
of the maximum possible degree of abstraction, to apprehend
the absolute character and being of God. For these two
things have no necessary connection, and yet they have been
frequently confounded. St. Teresa's noble confession of past
error, and consequent doubly valuable, amended teaching is
perhaps the most classical pronouncement extant upon this
profoundly important point. 2 The contingent, spatial and
tenlporal, manifestations and communications of God, above
all as we have them in the life of Our Lord and in those who
have come nearest to Him, but also, in their several degrees
and forms, in the lives of each one of us: all these, in their
sacred, awakening and healing, particularity and closeness of
contact, can and should be occasions and materials for the
most perfect, for the purest Love.
Indeed it is well never to forget that nothing, and least of
all God, the deepest of all the realities, is known to us at all,
except in and by means of its relation to our o\vn self or to
our fellow-creatures. Hence if Love were Pure only in pro-
portion as it could be based upon our apprehension of God as
independent of all relation to ourselves, Pure Love would be
simply impossible for us.-But, in truth, such a conception
would, in addition, be false in itself: it would imply that the
1 The Problem of Conduct, 1901, p. 329, n.
I Life, written by Herself. ch. XXII. tr. by David Lewis, ed. 1888, pp.
162- 1 74.
.
170 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
whole great Incarnation-fact and -doctrine,-the whole of
that great root of all religion, the certainty that it is because
God has first loved us that we can love Him, that He is a
self-revealing God, and One whom we can know and reach
because (( in Him we live and move and have our being "-was
taking us, not towards, but a\vay from, our true goal. There
are, surely, few sadder and, at bottom, more deeply un-
creaturely, unchristian attitudes, than that which would seek
or measure perfection in and by the greatest possible abstrac-
tion from all those touching contingencies which God Himself
has vouchsafed to our nature,-a nature formed by Himself
to require such plentiful contact with the historical and visible.
-And if God's pure love for us can and does manifest itself
in such contingent acts, then our love can and should become
and manifest itself purer and purer by means, not only of the
prayer of formless abstraction and expectation, but also by
the contemplation of these contingencies and by the pro-
duction of analogously contingent acts. And if so, then
certainly gratitude, in so far as it truly deserves the name,
can and does belong to Pure Love, for the very characteristic
of such gratitude consists in a desire to give and not to
receive.!
Not, then, the degree of disoccupation with the Contingent,
even of the contingent of our own life, but the degree of
freedom from self-seeking, and of the harmonization and
subordination of all these contingencies in and under the
supreme motive of the Pure Love and service of God in man
and of man in God, is the standard and test of Christian
perfection.
(2) As to the pleasureableness which, in normal psychic
conditions, more or less immediately accompanies or follows
the virtuous acts of the soul, the realizations of its own deeper
and deepest ideals, we should note that, in its earthly degree
and form, it is not included in what theologians mean by the
(( rewards" of virtuous action. And in this they are thorough-
ly self-consistent, for they adhere, I think with practical
unanimity, to Catherine's doctrine that these immediate
consequences of virtuous acts are not to be considered a
matter of positive and, as it were, separate divine institution,
-as something which, given the fundamental character of
1 Deharbe. op. cit. pp. 139-179. has an admirable exposition and proof
of this point. backed up by conclusive experiences and analyses of Saints
and Schoolmen.
LESS ULTIMATE THIS-WORLD DOCTRINES 171
man's spiritual nature, might have been otherwise; but as
\vhat,-given the immutable nature of God and of the image
of that nature in His creature,man,-follows from an intrinsic,
quite spontaneous necessity.-Hence, at this point especially,
would it be foolish and fanatical, because contrary to the
immanental nature of things, and to the right interplay of
the elemental forces of all life, to attempt the suppression
even of the several actual irruptions of such pleasure, and
still more of the source and recurrence of this delectation.
Fortunately success is here as impossibJe as it would be
undesirable,-as much so as, on a lower plane, would be the
suppression of the pleasure concomitant with the necessary
kinds and degrees of eating. Indeed, it is clear, upon reflec-
tion, that unless a man (at least implicitly) accepts and
(indirectly) wills that spiritual or physical pleasure, he cannot
profitably eat his food or love his God.
But from this in nowise fol]ows what Bossuet tried so hard
to prove,-that what is thus necessarily present in man, as a
psychical or physical prompting and satisfaction, must also of
necessity be willed by him, directly and as his determining
reason and justification. In turning to eat, man cannot help
feeling a psychic pleasure of an all but purely physical kind;
and, if he is wise, he will make no attempt to meddle with
this feeling. But he can either deliberately will, as his action's
object, that pleasure which is thus inevitably incident to the
act, and the more he does so, the more simply greedy and
sensual he will become; or he can directly will, as his
determining end, that sustenance of life and strength for his
work and spiritual growth, which is the justification and
ultimate reason of eating (the rationale of that very pleasure
so wisely attached by nature, as a stimulus, to a process so
necessary to the very highest 0 bj ects), and the more he does
so, the more manly and spiritual he will grow.
And so with everyone of man's wondrously manifold and
different physical, psychical, spiritual requirements and actions,
within the wide range of his right nature and ideals. There
is not one of them,-not the most purely physical-seeming of
these acts,-which he cannot ennoble and spiritualize by, as it
were, meeting it,-by willing it, more and more, because of its
rational end and justification. And there is not one of them,
-not an act which, judged simply by its direct subject-matter
and by the soul's faculties immediately engaged, would be
the most purely mental and religious of acts,-which man
I72 THE I\IYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
cannot degrade and de-spiritualize, by, as it \vere, following
it, by willing it more and more because of its psychical
attraction and pleasurable concomitance alone. For, in the
former case, the act, however gross may seem its material, is
made the occasion and instrument of spiritual character-
building and of the constitution of liberty; in the latter case,
the act, however ethereal its body, is but the occasion and
means of the soul's dispersion in the mere phenomenal flux of
the surface of existence, and ofitssubj ection to the determinism
which obtains here. l
Catherine's whole convert life is one long series of the
most striking examples of an heroic delicacy in self-know-
ledge and self-fighting in this matter: a delicacy which, as to
the degree of its possibility and desirableness in any particular
soul, is, however, peculiarly dependent upon that soul's special
circumstances, temperament, attrait, and degree of perfection
reached and to be reached.
(3) And, finally, as to the relations between the Contempla-
tive forms of Prayer, and Acts and variously complete States
of Pure Love; and, again, of such Prayer and Love, and
Abnonnal or Miraculous conditions: it is clear that, if there
is no true Contenlplation without much Pure Love, there can
be much Pure Love without Contemplation.
Abbé Gosselin well sunlS up the ordinary Catholic teaching.
ct l\Ieditation consists of discursive acts which are easily
distinguished from each other, both because of the kind of
strain and shock with which they are produced, and because
of the diversity of their objects. It is the ordinary foundation
of the interior life and the ordinary prayer of beginners,
whose imperfect love requires to be thus excited and sus-
tained by distinct and reflective acts. Contemplation consists,
strictly speaking, in direct C non-reflex' acts,-acts so simple
and peaceful as to have nothing salient by which the soul
could distinguish one from the other. I t is caned by the
Mystical Saints C a simple and loving look,' as discriminating
it from meditation and the latter's many methodic and
discursive acts, and as limiting it to a simple and loving
considera tion and view of God and of divine things, certified
and rendered present to the soul by faith. I t is the ordinary
prayer of perfect souls, or at least of those that have already
made much progress in the divine love. For the more purely
1 See Deharbe's excellent remarks. Ope cit. pp. 109, 110, n.
LESS ULTII\IATE THIS-WORLD DOCTRINES 173
a soul loves God, the less it requires to be sustained by
distinct, reflective acts; reasoning becomes a fatigue and an
embarrassment to it in its prayer-it longs but to love and to
contemplate the object of its love."
Or as Fénelon puts it: H' Passivity,' , Action,' is not pre-
cisely itself Pure Love, but is the mode in which Pure Love
operates. . . . 'Passivity," Action,' is not precisely the purity
of Love, but is the effect of that purity." 1 Y et,as M. Gosselin
adds, " It must be admitted that ,vithout Contemplation the
soul can arrive at a very high perfection; and that the most
discursive meditation, and hence stiU more all prayer as it
becomes effective, often includes certain direct acts which
form an admixture and beginning of contemplation." 2
And as to any supposed necessary relations between the
very highest contemplation and the most complete state
of Pure Love on the one hand, and anything abnormal
or miraculous on the other hand, Fénelon, in this point
remarkably more sober than Bossuet, \vell sums up the
most authoritative and classical Church-teaching on the
matter: '" Passive' Contemplation is but Pure Contempla-
tion: 'Active' Contemplation being one which is still mixed
with hurried and discursive acts. \tVhen Contemplation has
ceased to have any remnant of this hurry, of this' activity,'
it is entirely' Passive,' that is, peaceful, in its acts." "This
free and loving look of the soul means acts of the under-
standing,-for it is a look; and acts of the will, for the look
is a loving one; and acts produced by free-will, without any
strict necessity, for the look is a free look." "We should
not compare Passive Contemplation," as did Bossuet, "to
prophecy, or to the gift of tongues or of miracles; nor may
we say that this mystical state consists principally in some-
thing wrought by God within us without our co-operation,
and where, consequently, there neither is nor can be any
merit. We must, on the contrary, to speak correctly, say
that the substance of such Passive Prayer, taken in its specific
acts, is free, meritorious, and operated within us by a grace
that acts together \vith us" "It is the attraction to the acts
which the soul now produces which, as by a secondary and
counter-effect, occasions a quasi-incapacity for those acts
which it does not produce. Now this attraction is not of a
1 Analyse, loe. cit. pp. cxxii, cxxiii, Lettre SUI' l'Oraison Passive. ffiuvres.
Vol. VIII, p. 47.
· Analyse, p. cxxiii.
I74 THE MYSTICAL ELE1IENT OF RELIGION
kind to deprive the soul of the use of its free-will: we see
this from the nature of the acts which this attraction causes
the soul to produce. Whence I conclude that this same
attraction does not, again, deprive it of its liberty with regard
to the acts which it prevents. The attraction but prevents
the latter in the way it produces the other,-by an efficacious
influence that involves no sheer necessity." '" Passivity,' if it
comes from God, ever leaves the soul fully free for the exercise
of the distinct virtues demanded by God in the Gospel; the
attrait is truly divine only in so far as it draws the soul on
to the perfect fulfilment of the evangelical counsels and
promises concerning all the virtues." " 'fhe inspiration of the
Passive state is blft an habitual inspiration for the interior
acts of evangelical piety. It renders the Passive soul neither
infallible nor impeccable, nor independent of the Church even
for its interior direction, nor exempt from the obligation of
meriting and growing in virtue. . . . The inspiration of the
passive soul differs from that of actively just souls only in
being purer; that is, more exemptfrom allnaturalself-seeking,
more full, more simple, more continuous, and more developed
at each moment. We have, throughout, ever one and the
same inspiration, which but grows in perfection and purity in
proportion as the soul renounces itself more, and becomes
more sensitive to the divine impressions." 1
Thus we get an impressive, simple and yet varied, concep-
tion of spirituality, in which a real continuity, and a power and
obligation of mutual understanding and aid underlies all the
changes of degree and form, from first to last. For from first
to last there are different degrees, but of the same supernatural
grace acting in and upon the same human nature responsive
in different degrees and ways. From first to last there is,
necessarily and at every step, the Supernatural: at no point
is there any necessary presence of, or essential connection with,
the Miraculous or the Abnormal.
4. Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant.
Theology and Philosophy have not ceased to occupy them-
selves, at least indirectly, with the substance of these great
questions, since they furnished the subject-matter to Bossuet
and Fénelon in their memorable controversy; somewhat over-
subtle although some of it \vas in its earlier phases, owing to
Fénelon's chivalrous anxiety tó defend, as far as possible, the
1 Lettre sur l'Oraison Passive. (Euvres. Vol. VIII, pp. 10; 18. II. 12;
14. 15; 74.
LESS ULTIMATE THIS-WORLD DOCTRINES 175
very expressions, often so nebulous and shifting, of his cousin,
Madame Guyon.
(I) Indeed about twenty years before that controversy,
Spinoza had, in his Theologico-Political Treatise, and then,
more impressively still, in his Ethics, made a brilliant assault
upon all, especially all religious, self-seeking. Also on this point
these writings showed that strange, pathetic combination of
grandly religious intuitions and instincts with a Naturalistic
system which, logically, leaves no room for those deepest
requirements of that great soul; and here they revealed, in
addition, considerable injustice towards the, doubtless very
mixed and imperfect, motives of average humanity.
True intuition speaks in his Treatise (published in I670)
in the words: "Since the love of God is man's supreme
beatitude and the final end and scope of all human actions:
it foHows that only that man confonns to the divine law, who
strives to love God, not from fear of punishment, nor from the
love of some other thing, such as delights, fame, and so forth,
but from this motive alone, that he knows God, or that he
knows the knowledge and love of God, to be his supreme end."
But a little further back we learn that " the more we know
the things of Nature, the greater and the more perfect know-
ledge of God do we acquire"; a frank application of the pure
Pantheism of his reasoned system.
In his Ethics, again, a noble intuition finds voice where he
says: "Even if we did not know our l\Iind," our individual
soul, "to be eternal, we should still put Piety and Religion
and, in a word, all those virtues that are to be referred to
magnanimity and generosity, first in our esteem." But he is
doubtless excessive in his picturing of the downright, system-
atic immorality of attitude of ordinary men-the" slaves "
and" mercenaries." "Unless this hope of laying aside the
burdens of Piety and Religion after death and of receiving the
price of their service, and this fear of being punished by dire
punishments after death wereinn1en, and if they,contrariwise,
believed that their minds would perish with their bodies:
they would let themselves go to their natural inclination and
would decide to rule all their actions according to their lust."
And he is doubtlessly, though nobly, excessive in his
contrary ideal: H He who loves God cannot strive that God
shall love him inreturn,"-anideal which is,however,certainly
in part determined by his philosophy, which knows no ultimate
abiding personality or consciousness either in God or man.
.
176 THE l\IYSTICAL ELEl\fENT OF RELIGION
Yet, once again, we have him at his inspiring best when,
Catherine-like, he tells us: "The supreme Good of those who
pursue virtue is common to them all, and all are equally able
to rejoice in it "; and" this love towards God is incapable of
being stained by the passions of envy and bitterness, but is
increased in proportion as we figure to ourselves a larger
number of men joined to God by the same bonds of love";
when he declares: "we do not enjoy beatitude because we
master our passions; rather, contrariwise, do we master our
passions because we enjoy beatitude"; and when he insists,
with no doubt too indiscriminating, too ] acopone-like, a
simplification, upon what, initssubstance, is a profound truth:
" the intellectual," the pure" love of the soul for God is the
very love of God, where\vith God loves Himself." 1
(2) It was, however, the astonishingly circumspect and many-
sided Leibniz who, indefinitely smaller soul though he was,
succeeded, perhaps better than any other modern philosopher,
in successfully combining the divers constitutive elements of
the act and state of Pure Love, when he wrote in 1714: "Since
true Pure Love consists in a state of soul which makes me
find pleasure in the perfections and the felicity of the object
loved by me, this love cannot but give us the greatest pleasure
of which \ve are capable, when God is that object. And,
though this love be disinterested, it already constitutes, even
thus simply by itself, our greatest good and deepest interest."
Or, as he wrote in 16g8: "Our love of others cannot be
separated from our true good, nor our love of God from our
felicity. But it is equally certain that the consideration of
our own particular good, as distinguished from the pleasure
which we taste in seeing the felicity of another, does not enter
into Pure Love." And earlier still he had defined the act of
loving as" the finding one's pleasure in the felicity of another" ;
and had concluded thence that Love is for man essentially an
enjoyment, although the specific motive of love is not the
pleasure or the particular good of him who loves, but the good
or the felicity of the beloved object. 2
1 Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, c. iv, opening of par. 4, ed. Van
Vloten et Land, 1895, Vol. II, p. 4; ibid. middle of par. 3, p. 3; Ethica,
p. v, prop. xli, ibid. Vol. I, p. 264; ibid. Scholion, p. 265; ibid. prop.
xix, p. 251; ibid. prop. xx, p. 251; ibid. prop. xlii, p. 265; ibid. prop.
xxxvi, p. 261.
2 Die PhilosoPhischen Schriften von Leibniz, ed. Gebhardt, Vol. VI.
1885, pp. 605, 606; and quotation in Gosselin's Analyse, (Euvres de
F
nelon, 1820. Vol. IV, pp. clxxvìii. clxxvii.
LESS ULTIMATE THIS-WORLD DOCTRINES 177
(3) Yet it is especially Kant who, with his predominant
hostility to all Eudaemonism in Morality and Religion, has,
more than all others, renewed the controversy as to the rela-
tions between virtue and piety on the one hand, and self-seek-
ing motives on the other, and who is popularly credited with
an entirely self-consistent antagonism to even such a wise and
necessary attitude as are the amended positions of Fénelon
and those of Leibniz. And yet I sincerely doubt whether (if
we put asidethe question as to the strictly logical consequences
of his Critical Idealism, such as that Idealism appears in its
greatest purity in the Critique of Pure Reason, 1781 ; and if we
neglect the numerous, often grossly unjust, Spinoza-like sallies
against the su pposed undiluted mercenariness of ordinary piety,
which abound in his Religion within the Limits of Pure Reason,
1793) we could readily find any explicit pronouncement
hopelessly antagonistic to the Catholic Pure-Love doctrine.
Certainly the position taken up towards this point in that
very pregnant and curious, largely-overlooked little treatise,
The Canon of Pure Reason, which (evidently an earlier and
complete sketch), has been inserted by him into his later,
larger, but materially altered scheme of the Critique of 1781,
(where it now forms the Zweite H a'Uptstück of the Transcend-
entale M ethodenlehre, ed. Kehrbach, Reclam, pp. 603-628),
appears to be substantially acceptable. 1 "Happiness consists
in the satisfaction of all our inclinations, according to their
various character, intensity, and duration. The law of prac-
tical action, in so far as it is derived from the motive of happi-
ness, I call Pragmatic, a Rule of Good Sense; the same law, in
so far as it has for its motive only the becoming worthy of
such happiness, I call Moral, the Moral Law. Now Morality
already by itself constitutes a system, but Happiness does not
do so, except in so far as Happiness is distributed in exact
accordance with Morality. But such a distribution is only
possible in the intelligible world," -the world beyond pheno-
mena which can be reached by our reason alone-" and under
a wise Originator and Ruler. Such an One, together with life
in such a world-a world which we are obliged to consider as
a future one-reason finds itself forced to assume, or else to
look upon the moral laws as empty phantoms, since the
necessary result of these laws,-aresult which that same reason
1 It is to Schweizer's admirable monograph, Die Religions-Philosoph
e
Kant's. 1899, pp. 4-70, that I owe my clear apprehension of this very
interesting doubleness in Kant's outlook.
VOL. II. N
178 THE l\IYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
connects with their very idea,-would have to fall away, if
that assumption were to go. Hence everyone looks upon
the moral laws as coml1zandments, a thing which they could
not be, if they did not conjoin with their rule consequences
of a priori appropriateness, and hence if they did not carry
with them promises and threats. But this too they can do
only if they lie within the compass of a Single Necessary
Being, Itself the Supreme Good, Which alone can render
possible such a unity embracing both means and end.-Happi-
ness alone is, for our reason, far from being the Complete
Good, for reason does not approve of Happiness unless it
be united with the being worthy of Happiness, i. e. Moral
Rectitude. But Morality alone, and with it the simple being
worthy of happiness, is also far from the Complete Good.
Even if reason, free from any consideration of any interest of
its own, were to put itself in the position of a being that had
to distribute all happiness to others alone, it could not judge
otherwise: for, in the complete idea of practical action, both
points are in essential conjunction, yet in suchwise that it is
the moral disposition which, as condition, first renders possible
a sharing in happiness, and not the prospect of happiness
which first gives an opening to the moral disposition. For,
in this latter case, the disposition would not be moral, and,
consequently, would not deserve that complete happiness to
which reason can assign no other limi ta tion than such as
springs from our own immoral attitude of will." 1
In his Foundation of the MetaPhysic of Morals, 1785, the
noble apostrophe to the Good \Vill no doubt appears fonnally
to proclaim as possible and desirable a complete human
disposition, in which no considerations of Happiness play any
part: "The good will is good, not through what it effects or
produces, not through its utility for the attainment of any
intention or end, but it is good through the quality of the
volition alone; that is, it is good in itself. . .." U If, with its
greatest efforts, nothing were to be effected by it, and only
the good will itself were to remain, this bare will would yet
shine in lonely splendour as a jewel,-as something which has
its full value in itself." But further on he shows us how,
after all, "this good will cannot, then, be the only and the
whole good, but still it is the highest good and the condition
for all the rest, even for our desire of happiness." 2 Certain
1 Loc. cit. pp. 611, 614, 615, 616.
I Kant's Werke, ed. Berlin Academy. Vol. IV. 19 0 3. pp. 393. 394; 396.
LESS ULTIMATE THIS-WORLD DOCTRINES 179
exaggerations, which are next developed by him here, shall
be considered in a later chapter.
5. Four i1nportant points.
Here I will but put together, in conclusion, four positions
which I have rejoiced to find in two such utterly, indeed at
times recklessly, independent writers as Professor Georg
Simmel of Berlin and Professor A. E. Taylor.
(I) Dr. Simmel declares, with admirable cogency: It The
concept of religion completely loses in Kant, owing to his
rationalistic manner of discovering in it a mere compound
of the moral interest and the striving after happiness, its most
specific and deepest character. No doubt these two appre-
hensions are also essential to religion, but precisely the
direction in which Kant conjoins them,-that duty issues in
happiness, is the least characteristic of religion, and is only
determined. by his Moralism, which refuses to recognize
the striving after happiness as a valuable motive. The
opposite direction appears to me as far more decisively a
part of religion and of its incomparable force: for we thus
find in religion precisely that ideal power, which makes it
the duty of man to win his own salvation. According to
the Kantian Moralism, it is every man's private affair how
he shall meet his requirement of happiness; and to turn such
a private aspiration into an objective, ideal claim, would be for
Kant a contradiction and abomination. In reality, however,
religion itself requires that. man should have a care for his
own welfare and beatitude, and in this consists its incompar-
able force of attraction." 1 Let the reader note how entirely
this agrees with, whilst properly safeguarding, the doctrine
of Pure Love: it is the precise position of the best critics of
the unamended Fénelon.
(2) Professor Taylor insists that" it is possible to desire
directly and immediately pleasant experiences which are not my
own. . . . Because it is I who in every case have the pleasure
of the anticipation, it is assumed that it must be I who am to
experience the realization of the anticipation. " Yet" it is
really no more paradoxical that I should anticipate with
pleasure some event which is not to form part of my own direct
sensible experience, than it is that I should find pleasure in the
anticipation at twenty of myself at eighty." "The austerest
saints will and can mortify themselves as a thing well-pleasing
1 Kant, 1904, p. 131.
.
180 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
to God." 1 In this way the joy of each constituent of the
Kingdom of God in the joys of all the rest, and in the all-
pervading joy of God, is seen to be as possible as it is
undoubtedly actual: the problem of the relation between
pleasure and egoism is solved.
(3) And Professor Taylor again insists upon how pleasant
experiences, which do not owe their pleasantness to their
relation to a previous anticipation, are not, properly speaking,
good or worthy. It is by " satisfactions" and not by mere
" pleasures" that" even the most confirmed I-Iedonist must
compute the goodness of a life. . . . Only when the pleasant
experience includes in itself the realization of an idea is it
truly good." 2 But, if so, then the experience will be good,
not in proportion as it is unpleasant, as Kant was so prone
to imply; nor directly in proportion as it is pleasant, although
pleasantness will accompany or succeed it, of a finer quality
if not of a greater intensity, according as the idea which it
embodies is good: but directly in proportion to the goodness
of that idea. Thus all things licit, from sense to spirit, will
find their place and function in such acts, and in a life com-
posed of such acts, spirit expressing itself in terms of sense.
And the purification, continuously necessary for the ever more
adequate expression of the one in and by the other, will be
something different from any attempt at suppressing this
means of expression. Thus here again the great Christian
Incarnation- Doctrine appears as the deepest truth, and as
the solution of the problem as to the relations of pleasure and
duty.s
(4) And finally, as to the ever-present need and importance
of a theory concerning these matters, Professor Taylor points
out, not only that some such theory is necessary to the ful]
human life, but that it must place an infinite ideal before us :
paradox though it may sound, nothing less is truly practical,
for" any end that is to be permanently felt as worth striving
for, must be infinite," and therefore" in a sense infinitely
remote ..; and hence " if indifference to the demand for a
1 Ihe P"oblem of Conduct, pp. 336, 337; 329.
t Ibid. p. 3 2 7.
3 See James Seth, A Study of Ethical PrinciPles, 1894, pp. 193-236
where this position, denominated there II Eudaemonism," is contrasted
with II Hedonism," uniquely or at least predominantly occupied with the
act's sensational materials or concomitances, and .. Rigorism," with its
one-sided insistence upon the rational form and end of action.
LESS ULTIMATE THIS-WORLD DOCTRINES 181
practicable ideal be the mark of a dreamer or a fanatic,
contentment with a finite and practicable ideal is no less
undeniably the mark of an esprit borné." 1
Here Fénelon has adequately interpreted the permanent and
complete requirements of the religious life and spirit. It You
tell me," he says to his adversaries, (C that ( Christianity is not
a school of Metaphysicians.' All Christians cannot, it is true,
be l\1etaphysicians; but the principal Theologians have great
need to be such. It was by a sublime Metaphysic that St.
Augustine soared above the majority of the other Fathers,
who were, for the rest, as fully versed in Scripture and Tradi-
tion. It was by his lofty I\letaphysic that St. Gregory of
Nazianzum has merited the distinguishing title of Theologian.
It is by Metaphysic that St. Anselm and St. Thomas
have been such great luminaries of the Church. True, the
Church is not ( a school of Metaphysicians,' who dispute with-
out docility, as did the ancient sects of philosophers. Yet
she is a school in which St. Paul teaches that Charity is more
perfect than Hope, and in \vhich the holiest Doctors declare,
in accordance with the principles of the Fathers, that Love
is more perfect, precisely because it ( abides in God, not in
view of any benefit that may accrue to us from so doing.' "
U I know well," Fénelon writes to a friend, U that men misuse
the doctrines of Pure Love and Resignation; I know that
there are hypocrites who, under cover of such noble terms,
overthrow the Gospel. Yet it is the worst of all procedures
to attempt the destruction of perfect things, from a fear that
men will make a wrong use of them." Notwithstanding all
misuse of the doctrine- (( the very perfection of Christianity
is Pure Love." 2
1 Taylor, op. C'l-t. p. 901.
2 Seconde Lettre à Monsieur de Paris, CEuvres, Vol. V, pp. 268. 269_
Lettres de l'vI. de Cambrai à un de ses Amis, ibid.. Vol. IV. p. 168.
.
CHAPTER XII
THE AFTER-LIFE PROBLEMS AND DOCTRINES
iOVING on now to the questions concerning the After-Life,
it will be convenient to consider them under five heads: the
chief present-day positions and perplexities with regard to
belief in the After-Life in General; the main implications
and convictions inherent to an Eschatology such as Cathe-
rine's; and then the principal characteristics, difficulties,
and helps of her tendencies and teachings concerning Hell,
Purgatory, and Heaven. And throughout the Chapter we
shall busy ourselves directly only with the After-Life in the
sense of a heightened, or at least an equal, consciousness after
death, as compared to that which existed before death: the
belief in a shrunken state of survival, in non-annihilation,
appearing to be as certainly the universal minimum of belief
as such a minimum is not Immortality.
I. THE CHIEF PRESENT-DAY PROBLEMS, PERPLEXITIES,
AND REQUIREMENTS \VITH REGARD TO THE AFTER-
LIFE IN GENERAL.
No\v I take our chief present-day problems, perplexities,
and resultant requirements with regard to the After-Life in
general, to fall into three groups, according as those problems
are predominantly Historical, or Philosophical, or directly
Practical and Ethical.
I. Three Historical Difficulties.
The Historical group now brings very clearly and certainly
before us the striking non-universality, the startling lateness,
and the generally strange fitfulness and apparent unreason-
ableness characterizing the earliest stage of belief in the soul's
heightened, or at least equivalent, consciousness after death.
(r) Now with respect to the Non-Universality of the doctrine,
it is true that, in China, Confucianism is full of care for the
dead. UThroughout the Empire, the authorities are obliged to
182
AFTER-LIFE PROBLEl\tIS AND DOCTRINES 183
hold three annual sacrifices for the refreshment and rest of the
souls of the dead in general." U It is hardly doubtful that
the cult us of Ancestors formed the chief institution in
classical Confucianism, and constituted the very centre of
religion for the people. Even now ancestor-worship is the
only form of religion for which rules, applicable to the various
classes among the Emperor's su bj ects, are laid down in the
Dynastic Statutes." And Professor De Groot, from whom I
am quoting, gives an interesting conspectus of the numberless
ways in which the religious service of the dead penetrates
Chinese life. I-Yet we hear of Kong-Tse (Confucius) him-
self (551-478 B.C.), that, though he insisted upon the most
scrupulous execution of the three hundred rules of the
then extant temple-ceremonial, which were no doubt
largely busy with the dead, and though he said that one
should sacrifice to the spirits as if they were present, he
designated, in several of his sayings, occupation with
theological problems as useless: U as long as we do not knO\V
men, ho\v shall we know spirits? As long as we do not
understand life, how should we fathom death?" And to
questions relative to the spirits and the dead, he would give
evasi ve answers. 2 Thus the founder of the most characteristic
of the Chinese religions was without any clear and consistent
conviction on the point in question.
In India \ve find, for Brahmanic religion, certain unmis-
takable Immortality-Doctrines (in the sense of the survival
of the soul's self-consciousness), expressed in the hymns of the
Rig-Veda.-But already, in the philosophizings of the Upani-
shads, we get a world-soul, and this soul's exclusive perma-
nence : H to attain to true unity, the very duality of subject
and object is to disappear. The terms Atman and Brahman
here express the true Being which vivifies all beings and
appearances, and with which cognizing man reunites himself
whilst losing his individual existence." 3
And if we move on to Buddhism, with its hundreds of
millions of adherents in Burmah, Tibet, China, and Japan, we
can learn, from the classical work of Oldenberg, how interest-
ingly deep down lies the reason for the long conflict between
1 Chantepie de la Saussaye, Lehrbuch der Religions-Geschichte. ed. 1905,
Vol. I, pp. 69, 73-83.
2 Chantepie de la Saussaye, Lekrbuch del' Religions-Geschichte, ed. 1887,
V 01. I, pp. 24 8 , 249.
S Ibid. pp. 358, 373.
r84 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
scholars as to whether Nirvana is or is not to be taken for
the complete extinction of the individual soul. "Everything,
in the Buddhist dogmatic system, is part and parcel of a
circle of Becoming and of Dissolution: all things are but a
Dhamma, a Sankhara; and all Dhamma, all Sankhara are but
temporary. . . . The I\lutable, Conditioned is here thinkable
only as conditioned by another Mutable and Conditioned.
If we follow the dialectic consequence alone, there is no seeing
how, according to this system, there can remain over, when a
succession and mutual destruction of things conditioning and
of things conditioned has run its course, anything but a
pure vacuum." And we ha ve also such a sa ying of the
Buddha as the following. U Now if, 0 disciples, the Ego
(atta) and anything appertaining to the Ego (attaniya) cannot
be comprehended with accuracy and certainty, is not then the
faith which declares: (This is the world, and this is the Ego;
this shall I become at death,-firm, constant, eternal, un-
changeable,-thus shall I be there, throughout eternity,'-is
not this sheer empty folly?" U How should it not, 0 Lord,
be sheer empty folly? " answer the disciples. U One who
spoke thus," is Olden berg's weighty comment, If cannot have
been far from the conviction that Nirvana is annihilation.
Yet it is understandable how the very thinkers, who were
capable of bearing this consequence, should have hesitated to
raise it to the rank of an official dogma of the community. . . .
Hence the official doctrine of the Buddhist Church attained
the fonn, that, on the question of the real existence of the
Ego, of whether or not the perfected saint lives on after death,
the exalted Buddha has taught nothing. Indeed the legally
obligatory doctrine of the old community required of its
votaries an explicit renunciation of all knowledge concerning
the existence or non-existence of completely redeemed souls."
U Buddhism," so Oldenberg sums up the matter, with, I
think, the substantial adhesion of all present-day competent
authorities, U teaches that there is a way out of the world of
created things, out into the dark Infinite. Does this way
lead to new being? or does it lead to nothingness? Buddhist
belief maintains itself on the knife's edge of these alternatives.
The desire of the heart, as it longs for the Eternal, is not left
without something, and yet the thinking mind is not given a
something that it could grasp and retain. The thought of
the Infinite, the Eternal, could not be present at all, and yet
vanish further away than here, where, a mere breath and on
AFTER-LIFE PROBLEMS AND DOCTRINES 185
the point of sinking into sheer nothingness, it threatens to
disappear altogether." 1 This vast Buddhist community,
numbering, perhaps, a third of the human race, should not,
then, be forgotten, when we urge the contrary instances of
the religions of Assyria and Babylonia; of Egypt; of Greece
and Rome; and, above all, of the Jews and Christianity.
Yet it is well to remember that such non-universality of
belief is at least as real, to this very hour, for such a funda-
mental religious truth and practice as l\fonotheism and Mono-
latry; such purely Ethical convictions as l\Ionogamy and the
Illicitness of Slavery; such a plain dictate of the universal
humanitarian ideal as the illegitimacy of the application of
physical compulsion in matters of religious conviction; and
such directly demonstrable psychical and natural facts as
subconsciousness in the human soul, the sexual character of
plants, and the earth's rotundity and rotation around the sun.
In none of these cases can we claim more than that the
higher, truer doctrine,-that is, the one which explains and
transcends the element of truth contained in its predecessor
and opposite,-is explicitly reached bya part only of humanity,
and is but implied and required by other men, at their best.
Yet this is clearly enough for leaving us free to decide,-
reasonably conclusive evidence for their truth being forth-
coming,-in favour of the views of the minority: since the
assumption of an equality of spiritual and moral insight
and advance throughout mankind is as little based upon fact,
as would be the supposition of men's equal physical strength
or height, or of any other quality or circumstance of their
nature and environment.
(2) The lateness of the doctrine's appearance, precisely in
the cases where there can be no doubt of its standing for a
conviction of an endless persistence of a heightened conscious-
ness after death,-that is, amongst the Greeks (and Romans)
and the Jews (and Christians},-has now been well established
by critical historical research.
With regard to the Greeks,2 the matter is particularly plain,
1 Oldenberg, Buddha, ed. 1897. pp. 310-328; especially 3 1 3, 314; 316.
3 1 7; 3 2 7, 3 28 .
:& My chief authority here has been that astonishingly living and many-
sided book, Erwin Rohde's Psyche, ed. 1898, especially Vol. II, pp. 263-
295 (Plato); Vol. I, pp. 14-90 (Homer); 91-110 (Hesiod); pp. 146-199
(the Heroes); pp. 279-319, and Vol. II, pp. 1-136 (Eleusinian Mysteries,
Dionysian Religion, the Orphics). The culminating interest of this great
work lies in this last treble section and in the Plato part.
186 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
since we can still trace even in Plato, (427 to 347 B.C.), who,
next to Our Lord Himself and to St. Paul, is doubtless the
greatest and most influential teacher of full individual
Immortality that the world has seen, two periods of thought
in this matter, and can show that the first was without any
such certain conviction. In his Aþology of Socrates, written
soon after the execution in 399 B.C., he makes his great
master, close to his end, declare that death would bring to
man either a complete unconsciousness, like to a dreamless
sleep, or a transition into another life,-a life here pictured
like to the Homeric Hades. Both possibilities Socrates
made to accept resignedly, in full reliance on the justice of
the Gods, and to look no further; how should he know what
is known to no man ?-And this is Plato's own earlier teaching.
For in the very Reþublic which, in its chronologically later
constituents, (especially in Book V, 47IC, to the end of Book
VIII, Book IX, 560d to 588a, and Book X up to 608b), so
insists upon and develops the truth and importance of
Immortality in the strictest, indeed the sublimest sense: we
get, in its earlier portions, (especially in Book II, IOC, to Book
V, 460c), no trace of any such conviction. For, in these
earlier passages, the Guardians in the Ideal State are not to
consider what may come after death: the central theme is
the manner in which Justice carries with it its own recom-
pense; and the rewards, that are popularly wont to be placed
before the soul, are referred to ironically,-Socrates is de-
termined to do without such hopes. In those later portions,
on the contrary, there is the greatest insistence upon the
importance of caring, not for this short life alone, but for the
soul's" whole time" and for what awaits it after death. And
in the still later parts, (as in Books VI and VII,) the sublimest
form of Immortality is presupposed as true and actual
throughout. Thus in Greece it is not till about 390-380 B.C.,
and in Plato himself not till his middle life, that we get a
quite definite and final doctrine of the Immortality of all
souls, and of a blessed after-existence for every just and .holy
, life here below.
For the survival after the body's death, indubitably
attributed to the Psyche in the Homeric Poems, is conceived
there, throughout, as a miserably shrunken consciousness, and
one which is dependent for its continuance upon the good
offices bestowed by the survivors upon the corpse and grave.
And the translation of the still living Menelaus to Elysium
AFTER-LIFE PROBLEMS AND DOCTRINES 187
(Od. IV, 560-568) is probably a later insertion; belongs to a
small class of exceptional cases; implies the writer's inability
to conceive a heightened consciousness for the soul, after the
soul's separation from the body; and is based, not upon any
virtue or reward, but upon Menelaus's family-relationship to
Zeus. Ganymede gets similarly translated because of his
physical beauty (Il. XX, 232 seq.).
Hesiod, though later than Homer as a writer, gives us, in
his account of the Five Ages of the World (Works and Days,
11. 109-20r), some traces of an Animistic conception of a
heightened life of the bodiless soul beyond the grave,-a con-
ception which had been neglected or suppressed by Homer,
but which had evidently been preserved alive in the popular
religion of, at least, Central Greece. Yet Hesiod knows of
such a life only for the Golden and for the Silver Ages, and
for some miraculous, exceptional cases of the fourth, the
Heroic Age: already in the third, the Bronze Age, and still
more emphatically in his O\VTI fifth, the Iron Age, there are no
such consolations: nothing but the shrunken consciousness of
the Homeric after-death Psyche is, quite evidently, felt by
him to be the lot of all souls in the hard, iron present.
The CuUus of the Heroes is already registered in Draco's
Athenian Laws, in about 620 B.C., as a traditional custom.
And these Heroes have certainly lived at one time as men
upon earth, and have become heroes only after death; their
souls, though severed from the body, live a heightened
imperishable life, indeed one that can mightily help men
here below and now,-so at Delphi and at Salamis against
the Persians. Yet here again each case of such an elevation
was felt to be a miracle, an exception incapable of becoming
a universal law : not even the germ of a belief in the Immor-
tality of the soul as such seems to be here.
The CuUus of the Nether-World Deities, of the Departed
generally, and, as the culmination of all this movement, the
Eleusinian Mysteries, must not be conceived as involving or
as leading to, any belief in the ecstatic elevation of the soul,
or consciousness of its God-likeness; and such unending bliss
as is secured, is gained by men, not because they are virtuous
and devout, but through their initiation into the Mysteries.
Rohde assures us, rightly I think, that U it remains unproved
that, during the classical period of Greek culture, the belief in
Judges and a Judgment to be held in Hades over the deeds
done by men on earth, had struck root among the people" ;
188 THE MYSTICAL ELEl\IENT OF RELIGION
Professor Percy Gardner adds his great authority to the same
conclusion. 1 Here again it is Plato who is the first to take
up a clearly and consistently spiritual and universalistic
position.
Indeed it is only in the predominantly neuropathic, indeed
largely immoral and repulsive, forms of the Dionysiac sect
and movement, (at work, perhaps, already in the eighth
century B.C. and which leads on to the formation of the more
aristocratic and priestly Orphic communities) that a demon-
strable and direct belief arose in the soul's intrinsic God-
likeness, or even divinity, and in its immortality, or even
eternity; and that stimulations, materials, and conceptions
were furnished to Greek thought, which are traceable where-
soever it henceforth inclines to belief in the soul's intrinsic
Immortality.
Yet the leaven spread but slowly into philosophy. For
the Ionian philosophers, and among them Heraclitus, the
impressive teacher of the flux of all things, flourish from
about 600 to 430 B.C.; but, naive Materialists and Pantheists
as they are, they frankly exclude all survival of individual
consciousness after death. The Eleatic philosophers live
between 550 and 450 B.C., and are all busy with a priori
logical constructions of the physical world, conceived as sole
and self -explanatory; and amongst them is Parmenides, the
powerful propounder of the complete identity and immu-
tability of all reality. Those transcendent spiritual beliefs
appear first as part, indeed as the very foundation, although
still rather of a mode of life than of a formal philosophy, in
the teaching and community of Pythagoras, who seems to
have lived about 580 to 490 B.C., and who certainly emigrated
from Asia I\linor to Croton in Southern Italy. The soul
appears here as intrinsically immortal, indeed without
beginning and without end. And then Immortality forms one
(the mystical) of the two thoroughly heterogeneous elements
of the, otherwise predominantly Ionic and Materialistic,
philosophy of Empedocles of Agrigentum in Sicily, about
490 to 435 B.C. In both these cases the Dionysiac-Orphic
provenance of the" Immortali ty" -doctrines is clearly a pparen t.
And then, among the poets who bridge over the period up
to Plato, we find Pindar, who, alongside of reproductions of
the ordinary, popular conceptions, gives us at times lofty,
1 Psyche. Vol. I. pp. 308. 312. New Chapters in Greek History. 1892,
pp. 333. 334.
AFTER-LIFE PROBLEMS AND DOC1'RINES 189
Orphic-like teachings as to the eternity, the migration, and
the eventual persistent rest and happiness of the just Soul,
and as to the suffering of the unjust one; Aeschylus, who
primarily dwells upon the Gods' judgment in this life, and
who makes occasional allusions to the after-life which are
partly still of the Homeric type; Sophocles, who indeed refers
to the special privileges which, in the after-life, attend upon
the souls that have here been initiated into the Eleusinian
l'rlysteries, and who causes Oedipus to be translated, whilst
still alive, to Other-World happiness, but who knows nothing
of an unceasing heightened consciousness for all men after
death; and Euripides, who, showing plainly the influence of
the Sophists, gives expression, alongside of Pantheistic identi-
fica tions of the soul and of the aether, to every kind of
misgiving and doubt as to any survival after death.
And as to the appearance of the doctrine among the Jews,
we again find a surprising lateness. I follow here, with but
minor contributions and modifications from other writers
and myself, the main conclusions of Dr. Charles's standard
Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future L1fe, London,
1899, whose close knowledge of the subject is unsurpassed,
and who finds as many and as early attestations as are well-
nigh find able by serious workers. l
" The primitive beliefs of the individual Israelite regarding
the future life, being derived from Ancestor-worship, were
implicitly antagonistic to Yahwism, from its first proclama-
tion by Moses. . . . This antagonism becomes explicit and
results in the final triumph of Y ahwism." And to the early
Israelite, even under Y ahwism, H the religious unit was" not
the individual but H the family or tribe." Thus, even fully
six centuries after Moses, H the message of the prophets of
the eighth century," Amos, Hosea, Isaiah, Micah, II is still
directed to the nation, and the judgments they proclaim are
collective punishment for collective guilt. It is not till late
in the seventh century B.C. that the problem of individual
retribution really emerged, and received its first solution in the
teaching of Jeremiah." And H the further development of
these ideas," by the teaching of Ezekiel and of some of the
Psalms and Proverbs, as regards individual responsibility and
retribution in this life, and by the deep misgivings and keen
questionings of Job and Ecclesiastes, as to the adequacy of
1 See also the important study of the Abbé Touzard, Le D
veloppemenl
de la Doctrine de l'Immortaliti. Revue Biblique. 1898. pp. 207-241.
I90 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
this teaching, (l led inevitably to the conception of a blessed
life beyond the grave."
Yet throughout the Hebrew Old Testament the Eschatology
of the Nation greatly predominates over that of the Individual.
Indeed in pre-Exilic times (l the day of Yahwe," with its
national judgments, constitutes the an but exclusive subject
of the prophetic teaching as to the future. Only from the
Exile, (597 to 538 B.C.), onwards, does the eschatologicaJ
development begin to grow in complexity, for now the
individualism first preached by Jeremiah begins to maintain
its claim a]so. But not till the close of the fourth century, or
the beginning of the third century B.C., do the separate
eschatologies of the individual and of the nation issue finally in
their synthesis: the righteous individual will participate in the
l\lessianic Kingdom, the righteous dead of Israel will arise to
share therein,-thus in Isaiah xxvi, 1-19, a passage which it is
difficult to place earlier than about 334 B.C. The resurrection
is here limited to the just. In Daniel xii, 2, which is probably
not earlier than 165 B.C., the resurrection is extended, not
indeed to all members of Israel, but, with respective good and
evil effects, to its martyrs and apostates.
And the slowness and incompleteness of the develop-
ment throughout the Hebrew Old Testament is strikingly
illustrated by the great paucity of texts which yield, without
the application of undue pressure, any clear conviction or
hope of a heightened, or even a sheer, maintenance of the
soul's this-life consciousness and force after death. Besides
the passages just indicated, Dr. Charles can only find Psalms
xlix and lxxiii, and Job xix, 25-27, all three, according to
him, later than Ezekiel, who died in 571 B.C. l The textually
uncertain and obscure Job-passage (xix, 25, 26) must be dis-
counted, since it evidently demands interpretation according to
the plain presupposition and point of the great poem as a
whole.-And the same result is reached by the numerous,
entirely unambiguous, passages which maintain the negative
persuasion. In the hymn put into the mouth of the sick king
Hezekiah, for about 713 B.C., (a composition which seems to
be very late, perhaps only of the second century B.C.), we hear:
(l The grave cannot praise Thee. . . they that go down into
the pit cannot hope for truth. The living, the living, he shall
praise Thee, as I do this day." And the Psalter contains
1 Charles. Ope cit. pp. 52. 53; 58; 61; 84; 12 4, 12 5; 126- 1 3 2 ; 68-77.
AFTER-LIFE PROBLEMS AND DOCTRINES 19 1
numerous similar declarations. Thus vi, 5 : "In death there is
no remembrance of Thee: in the grave who shall give Thee
thanks? " and cxv, 17: "The dead praise not the Lord,
neither any that go do\vn into silence; but we praise the
Lord." See also Psalms xxx, 19; lxxxviii, II.
Indeed the name for the Departed is Rephaim, H the limp,
the powerless ones." Stade well says: II According to the
ancient Israelitish conception the entire human being, body
and soul, outlasts death, whilst losing all that makes life worth
living. That which persists in Sheol for all eternity is the
form of man, emptied of all content. Antique thought
ignores as yet that there exists no such thing as a form with-
out substance. The conception has as little in comnlon with
the conviction of the Imn10rtality of the Soul, which found
its chief support in Greek ideas, as with the expectation of the
Resurrection, which grew out of the Jewish Messianic hope,
or with the Christian anticipation of Eternal Life, which is
also based upon religious motives." 1
Yet, with respect to this objection from the lateness of the
doctrine, we must not forget that fully consistent Monotheism
and Monogamy are also late, but not, on that account, less
true or less precious; and indeed that, as a universal rule, the
human mind has acquired at all adequate convictions as to
most certain and precious truths but slowly and haltingly.
This process is manifest even in Astronomy, Geology, Botany,
Human Anatomy. It could not fail to be, not less but more
the case in a matter like this which, if it concerns us most
deeply, is yet both too close to us to be readily appreciated in
its tnle proportions, and too little a matter of mathematical
demonstration or of direct experience not to take much time
to develop, and not to demand an ever-renewed acquisition
and purification, being, as it is, the postulate and completion
of man's ethical and spiritual faiths, at their deepest and
fullest.
(3) And with regard to the unsatisfactory character of some
of the earliest manifestations of the belief, this point is brought
home to us, with startling vividness, in the beginnings of the
doctrine in ancient Greece. For Rohde's very careful and
competent examination of precisely this side of the whole
question shows conclusively (even though I think, with Crusius,
that he has overlooked certain rudiments of analogous but
1 B. Stade. Biblische Theologie des Alten Testaments. Vol. I. 1905.
p. 18...
I92 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
healthy experiences and beliefs in pre-Dionysiac Greece) how
new and permanently effective a contribution to the full
doctrine was made, for the Hellenic world and hence indirectly
for all Western humanity, by the self-knowledge gained in
that wildly orgiastic upheaval, those dervish-like dances and
ecstatic fits during the Dionysian night-celebrations on the
Thracian mountain-sides. Indeed Rohde traces how from
these experiences, partly from the continuation of them,
partly from the reaction against them, on the part of the
intensely dualistic and ascetic teaching and training of the
Orphic sect, there arose, and filtered through to Pythagoras,
to Plato, and to the whole Neo-Platonist school, the clear
conception and precise terminology concerning ecstatic, enthu-
siastic states, the divinity and eternity of the human soul, its
punitive lapse into and imprisonment within the body, and its
need of purification throughout the earthly Jife and of liberation
through death from this its incurably accidental and impeding
companion.-Thus we get here, concerning one of the chief
sources of at least the formulation of our belief in Immor-
tality, what looks a very nest of suspicious, repulsive circum-
stances :-psycho-physical phenomena, which, quite explicabJe
to, and indeed explained by, us now as in nowise supernatural,
could not fail to appear portentous to those men who first
experienced them; unmoral or immoral attitudes and activi-
ties of mind and will; and demonstrable excesses of feeling
and conception as regards both the static goodness, the down-
right divinity, eternity, and increateness of the soul, and the
unmixed evil of the body with its entirely disconnected along-
sideness to the soul. Does not all this spell a mass of wild
hallucination, impurity, fanaticism, and superstition?
Yet here again it behoves us, if not to accept, yet also not
to rej ect, in wholesale fashion and in haste. For the profound! y
experienced Professor Pierre Janet shows 1 us, what is now
assumed as an axiom, and as the ultimate justification of the
present widespread interest in the study of Hysteria, that H we
must admit for the moral world the great principle universally
admitted for the physical world since Claude Bernard,-viz.
that the laws of illness are, at bottom, the same as those of
health, and that, in the former, there is but the exaggeration
or the diminution of phenomena which existed already in the
latter. "
And if thus our recent studies of morbid mentalities have
1 L.Automatisme Psychotogique, ed. 19 0 3, p. 5.
AFTER-LIFE PROBLEMS AND DOCTRINES 193
been able to throw a flood of light upon the mechanism
and character of the healthy mind, a mind more difficult
to analyze precisely because of the harmonious interaction of
its forces, there is nothing very surprising if man, in the past,
learnt to know his own fundamental nature better in and
through periods of abnormal excitation than in those of
normal balance. And the resultant doctrines in the case in
question only required, and demand again and again, a careful
pruning and harmonizing to show forth an extraordinary
volume of abiding truth. The insuppressible difference be-
tween mind and matter, and the distinction between the fully
recollected soul (intuitive reason), and explicit reasoning; the
immeasurable superiority of mind over matter, and the superi-
ority of that full reason over this H thin" reasoning; the
certainty, involved in all our inevitable mental categories and
assumptions and in all our motives for action, of this mind
and intuition being more like the cause of all things than
are those other inferior realities and activities; the inde-
structibleness of the postulates and standards of objective
and infinite Beauty, Truth, Goodness, of our consciousness of
being intrinsically bound to them, and of our inmost humanity
and its relative greatness being measurable by just this our
consciousness of this our obligation, and hence by the keen-
ness of our sense of failure, and by our striving after puri-
fication and the realization of our immanental possibilities:
all this remains deeply fruitful and true.
And those crude early experiences and analyses certainly
point to what, even now, are our most solid reasons for belief
in Immortality: for if man's mind and soul can thus keenly
suffer from the sense of the contingency and mutability of all
things directly observed by it without and within, it must
itself be, at least in part or potentially, outside of this flux
which it so vividly apprehends as not Permanence, not Rest,
not true Life. Let us overlook, then, and forgive the first
tumultuous, childishly rude and clumsy, mentally and emotion-
ally hyper-aesthetic forms of apprehension of these great
spiritual facts and laws, forms which are not, after all, more
misleading than is the ordinary anaesthetic condition of our
apprehending faculties towards these fundamental forces and
testimonies of our lot and nature. Not the wholesale rejection,
then, of even those crude Dionysian witnessings, still less of
the already more clarified Orphic teaching, and least of all of
Plato's great utilizations and spiritualizations can be required
VOL. II. 0
.
..
194 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
of us, but only a reinterpretation of those first impressions
and of mankind's analogous experiences, and a sifting and
testing of the latter by the light of all that has been deeply
lived through, and seriously thought out, by spiritually awake
humanity ever since.-And we should remember that the
history of the doctrine among the Jews is, as has already been
intimated, grandly free from any such suspicious occasions
and concomitances.
2. Two PhilosoPhical Difficulties.
Yet it is precisely this latter, social, body-and-soul-survival
doctrine which brings the second group of objections, the
philosophical difficulties, to clear articulation. For thus we
are unavoidably driven to one or other of the equally difficult
alternatives, of a bodiless life of the soul, and of a survival or
resurrection of the body.
(I) Christianity, by its explicit teachings, and even more
by its whole drift and interior affinities, requires the survival
of all that is essential to the whole man, and conceives this
whole as constituted, not by thought alone but also by feeling
and will and the power of effectuation; so that the body,
or some unpicturable equivalent to it, seems necessary to this
physico-spiritual, ultimately organic conception of what man
is and must continue to be, if he is to remain man at all.-
And Psychology, on its part, is showing us, more and more,
how astonishingly wide and deep is the dependence, at least
for their actuation, of the various functions and expressions of
man's character and spirit upon his bodily frame. For not
only is the reasoning faculty seen, ever since Aristotle, to
depend, for its material and stimulation, upon the impressions
of the senses, nor can we represent it to ourselves other-
wise than as seated in the brain or in some such physical
organism, but the interesting Lange-James observations and
theory make it likely that also the emotions,-the feelings as
distinct from sensations,-ever result, as a matter of fact, from
certain foregoing, ph ysico- neural impressions and modifications,
which latter follow upon this or that perception of the mind,
a perception which would otherwise, as is the case in certain
neural lesions and anaesthesias, remain entirely dry and un-
emotiona1.
And the sense of the Infinite, which we have had
such reason to take as the very centre of religion, arises ever,
within man's life here below, in contrast to, and as a con
1 w. James. The PrinciPles of Psychology, 1891, Vol. II, pp. 442-467-
AFTER-LIFE PROBLEMS AND DOCTRINES 195
comitant and supplenlentation of, his perception of the Finite
and Contingent, and hence not \vithout his senses being alive
and active.
Now all this fits in admirably with the whole J ewish-
Christian respect for, high claims upon, and constant training
of the body, the senses, the emotions, and with the importance
attached to the Visible and Audible,-History, Institutions,
Society.- Yet our difficulties are clear. For however spiritually
we may conceive a bodily survival or resurrection; however
completely we may place the identity of the various stages
of the body in this life, and the sameness between the body
before death and after the resurrection, in the identity of its
quasi-creator, the body-weaving soul, we can in nowise picture
to ourselves such a new, indefinitely more spiritual, incorpora-
tion, and we bring upon ourselves acute difficulties, for both
before and after this unpicturable event. Before the resur-
rection there would have to be unconsciousness between death
and that event; but thus the future life is broken up, and for
no spiritual reason. Or there would be consciousness; but
then the substitute for the body, that occasions this conscious-
ness, would, apparently, render all further revivification of the
body unnecessary. And if we take the resurrection as effected,
\ve promptly feel ho\v mixed and clumsy, how inadequate,
how less, and not more, than the best and noblest elements of
our experience and aspirations even here and now, is such a,
still essentially temporal and spatial, mode of existence.
I take it that, against all this, we can but continue to main-
tain two points. The soul's life after bodily death is not a
matter of experience oroflogicaldemonstration, but a postulate
of faith and a consequence from our realization of the human
spirit's worth; and hence is as little capable of being satis-
factorily pictured, as are all the other great spiritual realities
which can nevertheless be shown to be presupposed and im-
plicitly affirmed by every act of faith in the final truth and
abiding importance of anything whatsoever.-And again, it is
not worth while to attempt to rescue, Aristotle-wise, just
that single, and doubtless not the highest, function of man's
spirit and character, his dialectic faculty, or even his intellect-
ual intuitive power, for the purpose of thus escaping, or at
least minimizing, the difficulties attendant upon the belief in
Immortality. If we postulate, as we do, man's survival, we
must postulate, without being able to fill in or to justify any
details of the scheme, the survival of all that may and does
,
\
.
196 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
constitute man's true and ultimate personality. How much
or how little this may precisely mean, we evidently know
but very imperfectly: but we know enough to be confident
that it means more than the abstractive, increasingly dualistic
school of Plato, Philo, Plotinus, Proclus would allow.
(2) But speculative reason seems also to raise a quite
general objection, based upon man's littleness within the
immense Universe, and upon the arbitrariness of excepting
those tiny points, those centres of human consciousness, men's
souls, from the flux, the ceaseless becoming and undoing, of
all the other parts of that mighty whole, imlnortal, surely, only
as a whole.
Here we can safely say that, at least in this precise form,
the difficulty springs predominantly not from reason or ex-
perience, but from an untutored imagination. For all our
knowledge of that great external world, which this objection
supposes to englobe our small internal world, as a part
inferior, or at most but equal, to the other parts of that whole,
is dependent upon this interior world of ours; and however
truly inherent in that external world we may hold that world's
laws to be, those laws can, after all, be shown to be as truly the
result of our own mind's spontaneous work,-an architectonic
building up by this mind of the sense-impressions conveyed
to it from without. And that whole Universe, in so far as it
is material, cannot be compared, either in kind or in dignity,
to Mind: only the indications there, parallel in this to our
experiences within our own mind, of a Mind and Spirit
infinitely greater and nobler than, yet with a certain affinity
to, our own,-only these constitute that outer world as great
as this our inner world. Indeed it is plain that l\laterialism
is so far from constituting the solution to the problem of
existence, that even Psycho-Physical Parallelism, even the
attribution of any ultimate reality to Matter, are on their
trial. I t is anyhow already clear that, of the two, it is easier
and nearer to the truth to maintain that Matter and its
categories are simply modes in the manifestation of Mind to
minds and in the apprehension of Mind by minds, than to
declare Mind to be but a function or resultant of l\latter. 1
But if all this is so, then no simply sensible predominance
of the sensible U ni verse, nor even any ascertainment of the
1 See Prof. James Ward's closely knit proof in his Naturalism and
Agnosticism, 2nd ed., 1905, and his striking address. "Mechanism and
Morals," Hibbef't Journal, October. 1905.
AFTER-LIFE PROBLEl\IS AND DOCTRINES I97
mere flux and interchange of and between all things material
and their elements, can reasonably affect the question as to
the superiority and permanence of Mind. But we shaH
return, in the next chapter, to the difficulties special to the
Immortality of individual human spirits or personalities,-for
this is, I think, the point at which the problem is still acute.
-- 3. Three Ethico-Practical Difficulties.
The last group of objections is directly practica
and
ethical, and raises three points : the small space and influence
occupied and exercised, apparently, by such a belief, in the
spiritual life of even serious persons; the seemingly selfish,
ungenerous type of religion and of moral tone fostered by
definite belief in, or at least occupation with, the thought of
an individual future life, as contrasted \vith the nobility of
tone engendered by such denials or abstractions from all such
beliefs as we find in Spinoza and Schleiermacher ; and, finally,
the plausibility of the teaching, on the part of some dis-
tinguished thinkers and poets, that a positive conviction of
this our short earthly life being the sole span of our individual
consciousness is directly productive of a certain deep tender-
ness, an heroic concentration of attention, and a virile truth-
fulness, which are unattainable, which indeed are weakened or
rendered impossible by, the necessarily vague anticipation of
an unending future life; a hope which, where operative at all,
can but d\varf and deaden all earthly aspiration and endeavour.
(I) As to the first point, which has perhaps never been
more brilliant I y affirmed than by Mr. Schiller, 1 I altogether
doubt whether the numerous appearances, which admittedly
seem to point that way, are rightly interpreted by such a
conclusion. For it is, for one thing, most certainly possible
to be deeply convinced of the reality and importance of the
soul's heightened after-life, and to have no kind of belief or
interest in Psychical Research, at least in such Research as
an intrinsically valuable aid to any specifically religious con-
victions. No aloofness from such attempts to find spiritual
realities at the phenomenal level can, (unless it is clear that
the majority of educated Western Europeans share the naïve
assumptions of this position), indicate negation of, or indiffer-
ence to, the belief in Immortality.-And next, it is equally
certain that precisely the most fruitful form of the belief is
that which conceives the After-life as already involved in this
I If The Desire for Immortality:. in Humanism. 1903. pp. 228- 2 49.
,
--
Ig8 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
one, and which, therefore, dwel1s specially, not upon the
posteriority in time, but upon the difference in kind of that
spiritual life of the soul which, even hic et nunc, can be sought
after and experienced, in ever imperfect degrees no doubt, yet
really and more and more. Here we ever get an approach to
Simultaneity and Eternity, instead of sheer succession and
clock-time: and here the fundamental attitude of the believer
would appear only if pressed to deny or exclude the death-
lessness of the spirit and its life,-the usual latency and
simple implication of the positive conviction, in no\vise
diminishing this conviction's reality.-And, finally, it \vould
have to be seen whether those who are indifferent or sceptical
as to Immortal or Eternal Life, are appreciably fewer and
largely other than those who are careless as to the other deep
implications and requirements of spiritual experience. \Ve
may well doubt whether they would turn out to be so.
(2) As to the second point, we have already found how
utterly insuppressible is the pleasure, norrnaHy concomitant
upon every act of noble self-conquest; and how, though
we can and should perform such and all other acts, as
far as possible, from the ultimate, detennining motive of
thereby furthering the realization of the Kingdom of God,
there can be no solid truthfulness or sane nobility in insisting
upon attempts at thinking away and denying the fact and
utility of that concomitant pleasure. But if so, then a further,
other-world extension of that realization and of this con-
comitant happiness, and a belief here below in such an eventual
extension, cannot of themselves be ignoble or debasing.
Occasions for every degree and kind of purely selfish and
faultily natural acts, of acts inchoatively supernatural but still
predominantly slavish, reappear here, in close parallel to the
variety of disposition displayed by men towards every kind
of reality and ideal, towards the Family, Science, the State,
Humanity, where the same concomitances and the same high
uses and mean abuses are ever possible and actual. Neither
here nor there should \ve attempt to impoverish truth and
life, in order to exclude the possibility of their abuse.-And it
would, of course, be profoundly unfair to contrast such a
rarely noble spirit as Spinoza among the deniers with the
a verage mind from among the affirmers. The average or the
majority of the deniers would not, I think, appear as more
generous and devoted than the corresponding average or
majority on the other side.
AFTER-LIFE PROBLEMS AND DOCTRINES 199
(3) And as to the supposed directly beneficial effects of a
positive denial of Immortality, such as have been sung for us
by George Eliot and Giovanni Pascoli, we can safeJy affirm
that the special tendernesses and quiet heroisms, deduced by
them from such a negation, are too obviously dependent upon
spiritual implications and instincts, for us to be able to put
them directly to the credit of that denial. Only in so far as
Immortality were not a postulate intrinsically connected with
belief in objective and obligatory Beauty, Truth, and Good-
ness,-in God as our origin and end,-could its persistent and
deliberate denial not be injurious to these fundamental con-
victions and to the ultimate health of the soul's life: and of
this intrinsic non-connection there is no sufficient evidence.-
Certainly, in such a case as Spinoza's, the same strain of
reasoning which makes him abandon individual Immortality
ought, in logic, to prevent him, a mere hopelessly determined
link in the Natura Naturata, from ever attaining to the free
self-dedication of himself, as now a fully responsible member
of the Natura Naturans. And if not all the grand depth of
his spiritual instinct and moral nobility, and its persistence
in spite of its having no logical room in the fixedly
naturalistic element of his teaching, can be urged as an
argument in favour of the ultimate truth and ethical helpful-
ness of that whole element, neither can it be urged with
respect to what is presumably one part of that element, his
denial of personal Immortality.
II. CATHERINE'S GENERAL AFTER-LIFE CONCEPTIONS.
Now Catherine's general After-Life Conceptions in part
bring into interesting prominence, in part really meet and
overcome, the perplexities and mutually destructive alter-
natives which we have just considered. I shall here again
leave over to the next chapter the simply ultimate questions,
such as that of the pure Eternity versus the Unendingness of
the soul; but shall allow myself, as to one set of her general
ideas, a little digression as to the probability of their ultimate
literary suggestion by Plato.-These Platonic passages prob-
ably reached her too indirectly, and by means and in forms
which I have too entirely failed to discover, for me to be able
to discuss them in my chapter devoted to her assured and
demonstrably direct literary sources. But these sayings of
200 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
Plato greatly help to illustrate the meaning of her doctrine.
-I shall group these, her general, positions and implications
under four heads, and shall consider three of these as, in
substance, profoundly satisfactory, but one of them, the
second, as acceptable only with many limitations, although
this second has obviously much influenced the form given by
her to several of those other conceptions.
I. Forecasts of the Hereafter, based upon present experience.
First, then, we get, as the fundamental presupposition of the
whole Eschatology, a grandly sane, simple, and profound
doctrine fonnulated over and over again and applied through-
out, with a splendid consistency, as the key and limit to all
her anticipations and picturings. Only because of the fact,
and of our conviction of the fact, of the unbroken continuity
and identity of God with Himself, of the human soul with
itself, and of the deepest of the relations subsisting between
that God and the soul, across the chasm formed by our
body's death, and only in proportion as we can and do
experience and achieve, during this our earthly Hfe, certain
spiritual laws and realities of a sufficiently elemental, universal,
and fruitful, more or less time- and space-less character, can
we (whilst ever remembering the analogical nature of such
picturings even as to the soul's life here) safely and profitably
forecast certain general features of the future which is thus
already so largely a present. But, given these conditions in
the present, we can and should forecast the future, to the
extent implied. And as Plato's great imaginative projection,
his life-work, the Republic, achieves its original end, (of
making more readily understandable, by objectivizing, on a
large scale, the life of the inner city of our own soul,) in so
far as he has rightly understood the human soul and has
found appropriate representations of its powers, laws, and
ideals in his future commonwealth, even if we cannot accept
this picture for political purposes and in all its details: so is
it also with Catherine's projection, which, if bolder in its
subject-matter, is, most rightly, indefinitely more general in
its indications than is Plato's great diagram of the soul.
Man's spiritual personality, being held by her to survive
death,-to retain its identity and an at least equivalent con-
sciousness, of that identity,-the deepest experiences of that
personality before the body's death are conceived as re-
experienced by it, in a heightened degree and form, after
death itself. Hence these great pictures, of what the soul will
AFTER-LIFE PROBLEMS AND DOCTRINES 201
experience then, would remain profoundly true of what the
soul seeks and requires now, even if there were no then at all.
And note particularly how only with regard to one stage
and condition of the spirit's future life,-that of the purifi-
cation of the imperfect soul,-does she indulge in any at all
direct doctrine or detailed picturing; and this, doubtless, not
only because she has experienced much concerning this
matter in her own life here, but also because the proj ection
of these experiences would still give us, not the ultimate state,
but more or less only a prolongation of our mixed, joy-in-
suffering life upon earth. As to the two ultimate states, we
get only quite incidental glimpses, although even these are
strongly marked by her general position and method.
2. Catherine's forecasts and present experience correspond-
ingly limited.
And next, coming to the projection itseU, we naturally find
it to present all the strength and limitations of her own
spiritual experiences which are thus projected: her attitude
towards the body and towards human fellowship, (two subj ects
which are shown to be closely inter-related by the continuous
manner in which they stand and fall together throughout the
history of philosophy and religion,) thus constitute the second
general peculiarity of her Eschatology. We have already
noted, in her life, her strongly ecstatic, body-ignoring, body-
escaping type of religion; and how, even in her case, it tended
to starve the corporate, institutional conceptions and affections.
Here, in the proj ection, we find both the cause and the effect
again, and on a larger scale. Her continuous psycho-physical
discomforts and keen thirst for a unity and simplicity as rapid
and complete as possible, the joy and strength derived from
ecstatic habits and affinities, would all make her, without even
herself being aware of it, drop all further thought as to the
future fate of that oppressive" prison-house" from which her
spirit had at last got free.
Now such non-occupation with the fate of the body and of
her fellow-souls may appear quite appropriate in her Purga-
torial Eschatology, yet we cannot but find that, even here, it
already possesses grave disadvantages, and that it persists
throughout all her After-life conceptions. For in all the states
and stages of the soul we get a markedly unsocial, a sola cum
solo picture. And yet there is, perhaps, no more striking
difference, amongst their many affinities, between Platonism
and Christianity than the intense Individualism which marks
202 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
the great Greek's doctrine, and the profoundly social concep-
tion which pervades Our Lord's own teaching,-in each case
as regards the next life as well as this one. Plotinus's great
culminating commendation of " the flight of the alone to the
Alone" continues Plato's tradition; whereas, if even St. Paul
and the Joannine writings speak at times as though the indi-
vidual soul attained to its full personality in and by direct
intercourse with God alone, the Synoptic Gospels, and at
bottom also those two great lovers of Our Lord's spirit, never
cease to emphasize the social constituent of the soul's life
both here and hereafter. The Kingdom of Heaven, the Soul
of the Church, as truly constitutes the different personalities,
their spirituality and their joy, as they constitute it,-that
great Organism which, as such, is both first and last in the
Divine thought and love.
Here, in the at least partial ignoring of these great social
facts, we touch the n1ain defect of most mystical outlooks;
yet this defect does not arise from what they possess, but
from what they lack. For solitude, and the abstractive,
unifying, intuitive, emotional, mystical element is also wanted,
and this element and movement Catherine exemplifies in rare
perfection. Indeed, in the great classical, central period of
her life she had, as \ve know, combined all this with much of
the outward movement, society, detailed observation, attach-
ment, the morally en-static, the immanental type. Unfortun-
ately the same ill-health and ever-increasing predominance
of the former element, which turned her, quite naturally, to
these eschatological contemplations, and \vhich indeed helped
to give them their touching tone of first-hand experience, also
tended, of necessity, to make her drop even such slight and
lingering social elements as had formerly coloured her
thought. It is, then, only towards the understanding and
deepening of the former of these two necessary movements
of religion, that these, her latter-day enlargements of some of
her deepest experiences and convictions will be found true
helps.
Yet if the usual ad extra disadvantages of such an abstrac-
tive position towards the body are thus exemplified by her,
in this her unsocial, individualistic attitude, it is most inter-
esting to note how entirely she avoids the usual ad intra
drawbacks of this same position. For if her \vhole attention,
and, increasingly, even her consciousness are, in true ecstatic
guise, absorbed away from her feHows and concentrated
AFTER-LIFE PROBLEMS AND DOCTRINES 203
exclusively upon God in herself and herself in God, yet this
consciousness consists not only of N oûs, that dry theoretic
reason which, already by Plato, but still more by Aristotle, is
alone conceived as surviving the body, but contains also the
upper range of Thzl1nos,-all those passions of the noblest
kind,-love, admiration, gratitude, utter self-donation, joy in
purifying suffering and in an ever-growing self-realization as
part of the great plan of God,-all the highest notes in that
wondrous scale of deep feeling and of emotionally coloured
willing which Plato made dependent, not for its character but
for the possibility of its operation, upon the body's union with
the sou1.-And thus we see how, in her conception of the
soul's own self within itself and of its relation to God, the
Christian idea of Personality, as of a many-sided organism in
which Love and Will are the very flower of the whole, has
triumphed over the Platonic presentation of the Spirit, in so
far as this is taken to require and achieve an ultimate sublima-
tion free from all emotive elements. Thus in her doctrine
the whole Personality survives death, although this PersonaJity
energizes only, as it \vere upwards, to God alone, and not also
sideways and downwards, towards its fellows and the lesser
children of God.
3. Catherine's forecast influenced by Plato.
Catherine's third peculiarity consists in a rich and profound
organization of two doctrines, the one libertarian, the other
determinist; and requires considerable quotation from Plato,
whose teachings, bereft of all transmigration-fancies, seem
clearly to reappear here, (however complex may have been
the mediation,) in Catherine's great conception.
The determinist doctrine maintains that virtue and vice,
in proportion as they are allowed their full development,
spontaneously and necessarily attain to their own congenital
consummation, a consummation which consists, respectively,
in the bJiss inseparable from the final and complete identity
between the inevitable results upon itself of the soul's deliber-
ate endeavours, and the indestructible requirements of this
same soul's fundamental nature; and in the misery of the, now
fully felt but only gradually superable, or even, in other cases,
insuperable, antagonism between the inevitable consequences
\vithin its own self of the soul's more or less deliberate
choosings, and those same, here also ineradicable, demands of
its own truest nature.
As Marsilio Ficino says, in his Theologia Platonica,
20 4 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
published in Florence in 1482 : " Virtue is reward in its first
budding, reward is virtue full-grown. Vice is punishment at
the moment of its birth; punishment is vice at its consumma-
tion. For, in each of these cases, one and the same thing is
first the simple seed and then the full ear of corn; and one
and the same thing is the full ear of corn and then the food
of man. Precisely the very things then that we sow in this
our (earthly) autumn, shall we reap in that (other-world)
summer-day." 1 I t is true that forensic terms and images are
also not wanting in Catherine's sayings; but these, in part,
run simply parallel to the immanental conception without
modifying it; in part, they are in its service; and, in part, they
are the work of the theologians' arrangements and glosses
discussed in my Appendix
And the libertarian doctrine declares that it is the soul
itself which, in the beyond and immediately after death,
chooses the least painful, because the most expressive of her
then actual desires, from among the states which the natural
effects upon her own self of her own earthly choosings have
left her interiorly free to choose.
Now it is in this second doctrine especially that we find so
detailed an anticipation by Plato of a whole number of highly
original and characteristic points and combinations of points,
as to render a fortuitous concurrence between Catherine and
Plato practically impossible. Yet I have sought in vain,
among Catherine's authentic sayings, actions, possessions, or
friends, for any trace of direct acquaintance with any of
Plato's writings. But Ficino's Latin translation of Plato,
published, with immense applause, in Florence in 14 8 3, 14 8 4,
must have been known, in those intensely Platonizingtimes, to
even non-professed Humanists in Genoa, long before Catherine's
death in 1510, so that one or other of her intimates may have
communicated the substance of these Platonic doctrines to
her. 2 Plotinus, of whom Ficino published a Latin translation
in 1492, contains but a feeble echo of Plato on this point.
Proclus, directly known only very little till much after
1 Gp. cit. Lib. XVIII, c. x, ed. 1559. fol. 3413.
2 Neither she nor her friends can have derived these doctrines from
Ficino's Theologia Platonica. Florence. 1482, since precisely the points
in question are quite curiously absent from, or barely recognizable in. that
book. See its cc. x and xi, Book XVIII. on II the State of the Impure
Soul U and II the State of the Imperfect Soul" respectively: ed. 1559.
fol. 340. v. seq. See also foIl. 318r. 3 1 9 V .
.
AFTER-LIFE PROBLEl'rIS AND DOCTRINES 205
Catherine's time, is in even \vorse case. The Areopagite,
who has so continuously taken over whole passages from all
three writers, although directly almost exclusively from
Proclus, contains nothing more immediately to the purpose
than his impressive sayings concerning Providence's con-
tinuous non-forcing of the human personality in its funda-
mental constitution and its free elections \vith their inevitable
consequences; hence Catherine cannot have derived her ideas,
in the crisp definiteness which they retain in her sayings, from
her cousin the Dominican nun and the Areopagite. And it
is certain, as we have seen, how scattered and inchoate are
the hints which she may have found in St. Paul, the Joannine
writings, and J acopone da Todi. St. Augustine contains
nothing that would be directly available,-an otherwise likely
source considering Catherine's close connection with the
Augustinian Canonesses of S. Maria delle Grazie.
In Plato, then, we get five conceptions and symbolic
pictures that are practically identical with those of Catherine.
(r) First we get the conception of souls having each, in exact
accordance with the respective differences of their moral and
spiritual disposition and character, as these have been con-
stituted by them here below, a " place" or environment,
expressive of that character, ready for their occupation after
the body's death. "The soul that is pure departs at death,
herself invisible, to the invisible wo rld ,-to the divine, immortal
and rational: thither arriving, she lives in bliss. But the soul
that is impure at the time of her departure and is . . .
engrossed by the corporeal . . . , is weighed down and drawn
back again into the visible place (world)."
And this scheme, of like disposition seeking a like place,
is then carried out, by the help of the theory of transmigration,
as a re-incarnation of these various characters into environ-
ments, bodies, exactly corresponding to them: gluttonous
souls are assigned to asses' bodies, tyrannous souls to those
of wolves, and so on : in a word, "there is no difficulty in
assigning to all 'a whither' (a place) answering to their general
natures and propensities." 1 For this corresponds to a law
which runs throughout all things,-a determinism of conse-
quences which does not prevent the liberty of causes. "The
King of the uníverse contrived a general plan, by which a
thing of a certain nature found a seat and place of a certain
I Phaedo, 8Ia-82a.
206 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
kind. But the formation of this nature, he left to the wills of
individuals."
Or, with the further spatial imagery of movements up,
level, or down, we get: " All things that have a soul change
. . . and, in changing, move according to law and the order of
destiny. Lesser changes of nature move on level ground, but
great crimes sink . . . into the so-called lower places . . .;
and, when the soul becomes greatly different and divine, she
also greatly changes her place, \vhich is now altogether holy." 1
The original, divinely intended " places" of souls are all high
and good, and similar to each other though not identical,
each soul ha ving its own special "place"; and for this
congenital" place" each soul has a resistible yet ineradicable
home-sickness. " The first incarnation" of human souls which
" distributes each soul to a star," is ordained to be similar
for all. . . . "And when they have been of necessity implanted
in bodily forms, should they master their passions . . . they
live in righteousness; if otherwise, in unrighteousness. And
he who lived well through his allotted time shall be conveyed
once more to a habitation in his kindred star, and there shall
enjoy a blissful and congenial life ; but failing this he shall
pass into . . . such a form of (further) incarnation as fits his
disposition . . . until he shall overcome, by reason, all that
burthen that afterwards clung around him." 2
If from all this we exclude the soul's existence before any
beginning of its body, its transmigration into other bodies,
and the self-sufficiency of reason; and if we make it all to be
penetrated by God's presence, grace, and love, and by our
corresponding or conflicting emotional and volitional as well
as intellectual attitude: we shall get Catherine's position
exact! y.
(2) But again, in at least one phase of his thinking, Plato
pictures the purification of the imperfect soul as effected, or
at least as begun, not in a succession of "places" of an
extensionally small but organic kind, bodies, but in a " place"
of an extensionally larger but inorganic sort,-the shore of a
lake, where the soul has to wait. "The Acherusian lake is
1 Laws, X, 904 a - e .
2 Timaeus, 4 1d , e; 4 2b , d. I have, for clearness' sake, turned Plato's
indirect sentences into direct ones; and have taken the Timaeus after
the Laws. although it is chronologically prior to them, because the full
balance of his system, (which requires the originally lofty .. place" of
each individual soul).-is, I think. abandoned in the Laws: see g04a.
AFTER-LIFE PROBLEMS AND DOCTRINES 207
the lake to the shores of which the many go when they are
dead; and, after waiting an appointed time, which to some is
longer and to others shorter, they are sent back to be born as
animals." Here we evidently get a survival of the conception,
predominant in Homer, of a pain-and-joyless Hades, but
limited here to the middle, the imperfect class of souls, and
followed, in their case, by transmigration, to which alone,
apparently, purification is directly attached.
In the same Dialogue we read later on: "Those who
appear to have lived neither well nor ill . . . go to the river
Acheron, and are carried to the lake; and there they dwell
and are purified of their evil deeds. . . and are absolved and
recei ve the rewards of their good deeds according to their
deserts." Here we have, evidently, still the same" many"
and the same place, the shores of the Acherusian lake, but
also an explicit affirmation of purification effected there, for
this purification is now followed directly, not by reincarnation,
but by the ultimate happiness in the soul's original and
fundamentally congenial" place." And this scheme is far
more conformable to Plato's fundamental position: for how
can bodies, even lower than the human, help to purify the
soul which has become impure precisely on occasion of its
human body?-We can see how the Christian Purgatorial
doctrine derives some of its pictures from the second of these
parallel passages; yet that the" longer or shorter waiting"
of the first passage also enters into that teaching,-especially
in its more ordinary modern form, according to which there
is, in this state, no intrinsic purification.
And lower down we find: "Those who have committed
crimes which, although great, are not unpardonable,-for these
it is necessary to plunge (èJL7TfUE'izl) into Tartarus, the pains of
which they are compelled to undergo for a year; but at the
end of the year they are borne to the Acherusian lake. But
those who appear incurable by reason of the greatness of their
crimes . . . such their appropriate destiny hurls (þí7TTEt) into
Tartarus, whence they never come forth." Here we get a
Purgatory, pictured as a watery substance in which the more
gravely impure of the curable souls are immersed before
arriving at the easier purification, the waiting on the dry land
alongside the lake; this Purgatory is, as a " place" and, in
intensity, identical with Hell; and into this place the
curable souls" plunge " and the incurable ones are" hurled."
Of this third passage Gatherine retains the identification of
208 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
the pains of Purgatory and those of Hell; the H plunge," or
"hurling," of two distinct classes of souls into these pains;
and the mitigation, after a time, previous to complete cessa-
tion, of the suffering in the case of the curable class. But the
H plunge," with her, is common to all degrees of imperfectly
pure souls; there is, for all these souls, no change of " place"
during their purgation, but only a mitigation of suffering;
and this mitigation is at work gradually and from the first.
And the ordinary modern Purgatorial teaching is like this
passage, in that it keeps the curable souls in Tartarus, say,
for one year, and lets them suffer there, apparently without
lnitigation, throughout that time: and that, in the case of
both classes of souls, it conceives the punishment as extrinsic,
vindictive, and inoperative.
And a fourth Phaedo passage tells us: H Those who are
remarkable for having led holy lives are released from this
earthly prison, and go to their pure home, which is above, and
dwell in the purer earth," the Isles of the Just, in Oceanus.
" And those, again, amongst these who have duly purified
themselves with philosophy, live henceforth altogether without
the body, in mansions fairer far than these." Here we get,
alongside of the two Purgatories and the one Hell, two
Heavens, of which the first is but taken over from Homer and
Pindar, but of which the second is Plato's own conception.
Catherine, in entire accord with the ordinary teaching, has
got but one "place" of each kind; and her Heaven
corresponds, apart from his formal and final exclusion of
every sort of body, to the second of these Platonic Heavens;
whilst, here again, the all-encompassing presence of God's
love for souls as of the soul's love for God, which, in her
teaching, is the beginning, means, and end of the whole
movement, effects an indefinite difference between the two
positions. 1
(3) Yet Plato, in his most characteristic moods, explicitly
anticipates Catherine as to the intrinsic, ameliorative nature
and work of Purgatory: " The proper office of punishment is
twofold: he who is rightly punished ought either to become
better. . . by it, or he ought to be made an example to his
fellows, that they may see what he suffers and. . . become
better. Those who are punished by Gods and men and
improved, are those whose sins are curable. . . by pain and
1 These four passages are all within pp. IIOb-II4d of the Phaedo.
AFTER-LIFE PROBLEMS AND DOCTRINES 209
suffering :-for there is no other way in which they can be
delivered from evil, as in this world so also in the other. But
the others are incurable-the time has passed at which they
can receive any benefit themselves. . . . Rhadamanthus," the
chief of the three nether-world judges, II looks with admiration
on the soul of some just one, who has lived in holiness and
truth. . . and sends him" without any intervening suffering
II to the Isles of the Blessed. . . . I consider how I shall
present my soul whole and undefiled before the Judge, in that
day." 1 Here the last sentence is strikingly like in fonn as
well as in spirit to many a saying of St. Paul and Catherine.
(4) But the following most original passages give us a senti-
ment and an image which, in their special drift, are as opposed
to St. Paul, and indeed to the ordinary Christian consciousness,
as they are dear to Catherine, in this matter so strongly,
although probably unconsciously, Platonist, indeed Neo-
Platonist, in her affinities. II In the time of Kronos, indeed
down to that of Zeus, the Judgment was given on the day on
which men were to die," i. e. immediately before their death;
" and the consequence was, that the judgments were not well
given,-the souls found their way to the wrong places. Zeus
said: I The reason is, that the judged have their clothes on,
for they are alive. . . . There are many, having evil sows, who
are apparelled in fair bodies or wrapt round in wealth and
rank. . . . The Judges are a wed by them; and they them-
selves too have their clothes on when judging: their eyes
and ears and their whole bodies are interposed, as a veil,
before their own sows. What is to be done? . . . Men shall
be entirely stript before they are judged, for they shall be
judged when dead; the Judge too shall be naked, that is,
dead: he, with his naked soul, shall pierce into the other
naked soul immediately after each man dies . . . and is
bereft of all his kith and kin, and has left behind him all his
brave attire upon earth, and thus the Judgment will be just.'''2
-If we compare this with St. Paul's precisely contrary instinct
and desire to be II clothed upon" at death, II lest we be found
naked," i. e. without the protection of any kind of body; and
then realize Catherine's intense longing for "nudità,"-to strip
herself here, as far as possible, from all imperfection and self-
delusion before the final stripping off of the body in death,
and to appear, utterly naked, before the utterly naked eye of
1 Gorgias. pp. 5 2 5 b . c; 526c, d.
VOL. II.
I Ibid. p. 5 2 3b-e.
p
210 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
God, so that no U clothes" should remain requiring to be
burnt away by the purifying fires, 1 the profound affinity of
sentiment and imagery between Catherine and Plato--and
this on a point essentially Platonic,-is very striking.
(5) But, above all, in his deep doctrine as to the soul's
spontaneous choice after death of that condition, Ie place,"
which, owing to the natural effects within her of her earthly
willings and self-formation, she cannot but now find the most
congenial to herself, Plato appears as the ultimate source of
a Jiterary kind for Catherine's most original view, which
otherwise is, I think, without predecessors. Ie The souls,"
he tells us iu the Republic, U immediately on their arrival in
the other world, were required to go to Lachesis," one of the
three Fates. And Ie an interpreter, having taken from her
lap a number of lots and plans of life, spoke as follows:
I Thus saith Lachesis, the daughter of Necessity. . . . Ie Your
destiny shall not be allotted to you, but you shall choose it
for yourselves. Let him who draws the first lot, be the first
to choose a life which shall be his irrevocably. . . . The
responsibility lies \vith the chooser, Heaven is guiltless." , "
Ie No settled character of soul was included in the plans of
life, because, with the change of life, the soul inevitably became
changed itself." U It was a truly wonderful sight, to watch
how each soul selected its life. . . . When all the souls had
chosen their lives, Lachesis dispatched with each of them the
Destiny he had selected, to guard his life and satisfy his
choice." 2 And in the Phaedrus Plato tells us that Ie at the
end of the first thousand years" (of the first incarnation)
Ie the good souls and also the evil souls both come to cast
lots and to choose their second life; and they may take any
that they like." 3
In both the dialogues the lots are evidently taken over from
popular mythology, but are here made merely to introduce a
certain orderly succession among the spontaneous choosings
of the souls themselves, whilst the lap of the daughter of
Necessity, spread out before all the choosers previous to their
choice, and the separate, specially appropriate Destiny that
accompanies each soul after its choice, indicate plainly that,
although the choice itself is the free act and pure self-expres-
sion of each soul's then present disposition, yet that this
disposition is the necessary result of its earthly volitions and
1 2 Cor. v, 2, 3.-Vila, pp. 10gb, 66a, 171a.
:& Republic, X, pp. 617e. 61ge, g20e. I Phaedrus, p. 249b.
AFTER-LIFE PROBLEMS AND DOGTRINES 2II
self-development oc self-deformation, and that the choice now
made becomes, in its turn, the cause of certain inevitable
consequences,-of a special environment which itself is then
productive of special effects upon, and of special occa-
sions for, the final working out of this soul's character.-
Plotinus retains the doctrine: II the soul chooses there" in
the Other world,-" its Daen10n and its kind of life." 1 But
neither Proclus nor Dionysius has the doctrine, whilst
Catherine, on the contrary, reproduces it with a penetrating
completeness.
4. SimPlifications characteristic of Catherine's Eschatology.
And under our last, fourth head, we can group the simpli-
fications characteristic of Catherine's Eschatology.
(1) One simplification has, of course, for now some fifteen
hundred years, been the ordinary Christian conception: I
mean the elimination of the time-element between the
moment of death and the beginning of the three states. Yet
it is interesting to note how by far the greatest of the Latin
Fathers, St. Augustine, who died in 430 A.D., still clings pre-
dominantly to the older Christian and Jewish conception of
the soul abiding in a state of shrunken, joy-and-painless con-
sciousness from the moment of the body's death up to that
of the general resurrection and j udgmen t. II After this short
life, thou wilt not yet be where the saints will be," i. e. in
Hea ven. "Thou wilt not yet be there: who is ignorant of
this? But thou canst straightway be where the rich man
descried the ulcerous beggar to be a-resting, far away," i. e. in
Limbo. II Placed in that rest, thou canst await the day of
judgment \vith security, when thou shalt receive thy body
also, when thou shalt be changed so as to be equal to an
Angel." 2 Only with regard to Purgatory, a state held by
him, in writings of his last years, 410-430 A.D., to be possible,
indeed probable, does he make an exception to his general
rule: for such purification would have to take place II in
the interval of time between the death of the body and the
last day of condemnation and reward." 3
It is doubtless the still further fading away of the expecta-
tion, so vivid and universal in early Christian times, of
the proximity of Our Lord's Second Advent, and the tacit
1 Enneads, III, 4, 5.
Z Enarr. in Ps. xxxvi,
I, n. 10, ed. Ben., co!. 375b. See also Enchit'i-
dion, CIX, ibid. col. 402d.
3 So in the De Civitate Dei. Lib. XXI, c. xxvi, n. 4, ibid. col. 1037d.
,
212 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
prevalence of Greek affinities and conceptions concerning
the bodiless soul, that helped to eliminate, at last universally,
this interval of waiting, in the case of souls too good or too
bad for purgation, from the general consciousness of at least
Western Christendom. The gain in this was the great sim-
plification and concentration of the immediate outlook and
interest; the loss was the diminished apprehension of the
essentially complex, concrete, synthetic character of man's
nature, and of the necessity for our assuming that this
characteristic \vill be somehow preserved in this nature's
ultimate perfection.
(2) There is a second simplification in Catherine which,
though here St. Augustine leads the way, is less common
among Christians: her three other-world" places" are not,
according to her ultimate thought, three distinct spatial ex-
tensions and localities, filled, respectively, with ceaselessly
suffering, temporarily suffering, and ceaselessly blessed souls;
but they are, (notwithstanding all the terms necessitated by
such spatial picturings as " entering," " coming out," " plung-
ing into,") so many distinct states and conditions of the soul,
of a painful, mixed, or joyful character. We shall have these
her ultimate ideas very fully before us presently. But here I
would only remark that this her union of a picturing faculty,
as vivid as the keenest sense-perception, and of a complete
non-enslavement to, a vigorous utilization of, these life-like
spatial projections, by a religious instinct and experience
which never forgets that God and souls are spirits, to whom
our ordinary categories of space and extension, time and
motion, do not and cannot in strictness apply, is as rare as it
is admirable; and that, though her intensely anti-corporeal
and non-social attitude made such a position more imme-
diately easy for her than it can be for those who remain keenly
a ware of the grea t truths in vol ved in the doctrines of the
Resurrection of the Body and the Communion of Saints, this
her trend of thought brings into full articulation precisely the
deepest of our spiritual apprehensions and requirements,
whilst it is not her fault if it but further accentuates some of
our intellectual perplexities.
We get much in St. Augustine, which he himself declares
to have derived, in the first instance, from" the writings of the
Platonists," which doubtless means above all Plotinus, (that
keen spiritual thinker who can so readily be traced through-
out this part of the great Convert's teaching,) as to this
AFTER-LIFE PROBLEl\fS AND DOCTRINES 213
profound incommensurableness between spiritual presence,
energizing, and affectedness on the one hand, and spatial
position, extension, and movement on the other. II What
place is there within me, to which my God can come? . . . I
would not exist at all, unless Thou already wert within me."
II Thou wast never a place, and yet we have receded from
Thee; and we have drawn near to Thee, yet Thou art never
a place." "Are we submerged and do we emerge? Yet it
is not places into which we are plunged and out of which we
rise. What can be more like to places and yet more unlike?
For here the affections are in case,-the impurity of our spirit,
which flows downwards, oppressed by the love of earthly
cares; and the holiness of Thy Spirit, which lifts us upwards
with the love of security." 1 For, as he teaches II the spiritual
creature can only be changed by times,"-a succession within
a duration: II by remembering what it had forgotten, or by
learning what it did not know, or by willing what it did not
will. The bodily creature can be changed by times and places,
by spatial motion, "from earth to heaven, from heaven to
earth, from east to west." II That thing is not moved through
space which is not extended in space. . . the soul is not
considered to move in space, unless it be held to be a body." 2
In applying the doctrine just expressed to eschatological
n1atters, St. Augustine concludes: II If it be asked whether
the soul, when it goes forth from the body, is borne to some
corporeal places, or to such as, though incorporeal, are like
to bodies, or to what is more exceHent than either: I readily
answer that, unless it have some kind of body, it is not borne
to bodily places at all, or, at least, that it is not borne to them
by bodily motion. . . . But I myself do not think that it
possesses any body, when it goes forth from this earthly body.
. . . It gets borne, according to its deserts, to spiritual con-
ditions, or to penal places having a similitude to bodies." 3
The reader will readily note a curiously uncertain frame of
n1Ïnd in this last utterance. I take it that Plotinian influences
are here being checked by the Jewish conception of certain,
definitely located, provision-chambers (Promptuaria), in which
1 Confess., Lib. I. c. 2. n. I; X, c. 26; XIII, c. 7.
:& De Genesi ad lilt.. Lib. VIII. n. 39. ed. Ben. col. 387b; n. 43, col.
3 8 9 a .
8 Ibid. Lib. XII, n. 32, col. 507c. He soon after attempts to decide in
favour of .. incorporeal places:' as the other-world destinatjoq of all
classes of human souls. ·
.
214 THE l\fYSTICAL ELEl\fENT OF RELIGION
all souls are placed for safe keeping, between the time of the
body's death and its resurrection. So in the Fourth Book of
Esra (of about go A.D.), H the souls of the just in their
chambers said: I How long are we to remain here? ' "; and in
the Apocalypse of Baruch (of about I50-250 A.D.), H at the
coming of the Messiah, the provision-chambers will open, in
which the" whole, precise" number of the souls of the just
have been kept, and they will come forth." 1
But it is St. Tholnas Aquinas who, by the explicit and
consistent adoption and classification of these pr011lPtuaria
receptacula, reveals to us more clearly the perplexities and
fancifulnesses involved in the strictly spatial conception.
H Although bodies are not assigned to souls (immediately)
after death, yet certain bodily places are congruously assigned
to these souls in accordance with the degree of their dignity,
in which places they are, as it were, locally, in the manner in
which bodiless things can be in space: each soul having a
higher place assigned to it, according as it approaches more or
less to the first substance, God, whose seat, according to
Scripture, is Heaven." H In the Scriptures God is called the
Sun, since He is the principle of spiritual life, as the physical
sun is of bodily life; and, according to this convention, . . .
souls spiritually inuminated have a greater fitness for lumin-
ous bodies, and sin-darkened souls for dark places." H It is
probable that, as to local position, Hell and the Limbo of the
Fathers constitute one and the same place, or are more or less
continuous." H The place of Purgatory adjoins (that of) Hell."
H There are altogether five places ready to receive (receptanda)
souls bereft of their bodies: Paradise, the Limbo of the
Fathers, Purgatory, Hell, and the Limbo of Infants." 2
No doubt all these positions became the common scholastic
teaching. But then, as Cardinal Bellarmine cogently points
out: H no ancient, as far as I know, has written that the
Earthly Paradise was destroyed . . . and I have read a large
number who affinn its existence. This is the doctrine of all
the Scholastics, beginning with St. Thomas, and of the Fathers
. . . St. Augustine indeed appears to rank this truth amongst
the dogmas of faith." 3 We shall do well, then, not to press
1 Esra IV. iv, 35. See also iv. 41; vn, 3 2 . 80, 95, 101. Apocalypse of
Baruch, xxx, 2.
:I Summa Theol., supp1., quo 69, art. I, in corp. et ad 3; art. 6, in corp.;
Appendix de Purgat., art. 2, in corp.; supp1., quo 69. art. 7 condo
I De gratia primi homÍ1lis XIV.
AFTER-LIFE PROBLEMS AND DOCTRINES 215
these literal localization-schemes, especially since, according to
St. Augustine's penetrating analysis, our spiritual experiences,
already in this our earthly existence, have a distinctly non-
spatial character. Catherine's position, if applied to the
central life of man here, and hence presumptively hereafter,
remains as true and fresh and unassailable as ever.
(3) And her last simplification consists in taking the Fire
of Hell, the Fire of Purgatory, and the Fire and Ijght of
Heaven as profoundly appropriate symbols or descriptions of
the variously painful or joyous impressions produced, through
the differing volitional attitudes of souls towards Him, by the
one God's intrinsically identical presence in each and all. In
all three cases, throughout their several grades, there are ever
but two realities, the Spirit-God and the spirit-soul, in various
states of inter-relation.
Here again it is Catherine's complete abstraction from the
body which renders such a view easy and, in a manner, neces-
sary for her mind. But here I would only emphasize the
impressive simplicity and spirituality of view which thus, as
in the material world it finds the one sun-light and the one
fire-heat, which, in themselves everywhere the same, vary
indefinitely in their effects, owing to the varying condition of
the different bodies which meet the rays and flames; so, in
the Spiritual World it discovers One supreme spiritual Energy
and Influence which, whilst ever self-identical, is assimilated,
deflected, or resisted by the lesser spirits, with inevitably
joyous, mixed, or painful states of soul, since they can each
and all resist, but cannot eradicate that Energy's impression
within their deepest selves. And though, even with her, the
Sun-light imdge remains quasi-Hellenic and Intellectual, and
the Fire-heat picture is more immediately Christian and
Moral: yet she also frequently takes the sunlight as the
symbol of the achieved Harmony and Peace, and the Fire-
heat as that of more or less persisting Conflict and Pain. She
is doubtless right in keeping both symbols, and in ever think-
ing of each as ultimately implying the other, for God is Beauty
and Truth, as well as Goodness and Love, and man is made
with the indestructible aspiration after Him in His living
completeness.
And here again Catherine has a complicated doctrinal
history behind her.
We have already considered the numerous Scriptural
passages wh<!re God and His effects upon the soul are
216 THE
fYSTICAL ELE
IENT OF RELIGION
symbolized as light and fire; and those again where joy or,
contrariwise, trial and suffering are respectively pictured by
the same physical properties. And Catherine takes the latter
passages as directly explanatory of the first, in so far as these
joys and sufferings are spiritual in their causes or effects.
Among the Greek Fathers, Clement of Alexandria tells
us that "the Fire" of Purgatory,-for he has no Eternal
Damnation,-H is a rational," spiritual, U fire that penetrates
the soul "; and Origen teaches that " each sinner himself
lights the flame of his own fire, and is not thrown into a fire
that has been lit before that moment and that exists in front
of him. . . . His conscience is agitated and pierced by its own
pricks." Saints Gregory of Nyssa and Gregory of Nazianzum
are more or less influenced by Origen on this point. And
St. John Damascene, who died in about 750 A.D., says ex-
plicitly that the fire of Hell is not a material fire, that it is
very different from our ordinary fire, and that men hardly
know what it is.!
Among the Latins, St. Ambrose declares: II neither is the
gnashing, a gnashing of bodily teeth; nor is the everlasting
fire, a fire of bodily flames; nor is the worm, a bodily one."-
St. Jerome, in one passage, counts the theory of the non-
physical fire as one of Origen's errors; but elsewhere he
mentions it without any unfavourable note, and even enumer-
ates several Scripture-texts which favour it, and admits that
II 'the worm which dieth not and the fire which is not
quenched,' is understood, by the majority of interpreters (a
plerisque), of the conscience of sinners which tortures them." 2
-St. Augustine, in 413 A.D., declares: " In the matter of the
pains of the wicked, both the unquenchable fire and the in-
tensely living worm are interpreted differently by different
commentators. Some interpreters refer both to the body,
others refer both to the soul; and some take the fire liter-
ally, in application to the body, and the worm figuratively, in
application to the soul, which latter opinion appears the more
credible." Yet when, during the last years of his life, he came,
some\vhat tentatively, to hold an other-world Purgatory as
welJ, he throughout assimilated this Purgatory's fire to the
1 Clemens, Stromata, VII, 6. Origen, De Princ.. II, 10. 4. St. Greg.
Nyss., Orat.. XL. 36. St. Greg. Nazianz.. Poema de SeiPso. I, 546. St.
Joann. Damase.. De Fide Orthod.. cap. ult.
I St. Ambros.. In Lucam. VII. 205. St. ::LÏeron.. Ep. 124, 7; A pol.
on.tra Ruf.. II; in Isa. lxv, 24.
AFTER-LIFE PROBLEMS AND DOCTRINES 217
fire of this-world sufferings. Thus in 422 A.D. : " Souls \vhich
renounce the wood, hay, straw, built upon that foundation
(I Cor. iü, II-IS), not without pain indeed (since they loved
these things with a carnal affection), but with faith in the
foundation, a faith operative through love. . . arrive at salva-
tion, through a certain fire of pain. . . . Whether men suffer
these things in this life only, or such-like judgments follow even
after this life-in either case, this interpretation of that text
is not discordant with the truth." II I He shall be saved yet
so as by fire,' because the pain, over the loss of the things he
loved, burns him. It is not incredible that some such thing
takes place even after this Hfe . . . that some of the faithful
are saved by a certain purgatorial fire, more quickly or more
slowly, according as they have less or more loved perishable
things." 1
St. Thomas, voicing and leading Scholastic opinion, teaches
that the fire of Purgatory is the same as that of Hell; and
Cardinal Bellarmine, who died in 1621, tells us : " The com-
mon opinion of theologians is that the fire of Purgatory is a
real and true fire, of the same kind as an earthly fire. This
opinion, it is true, is not of faith, but it is very probable,"-
because of the II consent of the scholastics, who cannot be
despised without temerity," and also because of " the erup-
tions of Mount Etna." 2 Yet the Council of Florence had, in
1439, restricted itself to the quite general proposition that
" if men die truly penitent, in the love of God, before they
have satisfied . . . for their sins . . . their souls are purified
by purgatorial pains after death"; thus very deliberately
avoiding all commitment as to the nature of these pains. 3
Cardinal Gousset, who died in 1866, tells us: II The more
common opinion amongst theologians makes the sufferings
of Purgatory to consist in the pain of fire, or at least in a pain
analogous to that of fire." 4 This latter position is practically
identical with Catherine's.
As to the fire of Hell, although here especially the Scho-
lastics, old and new, are unanimous, it is certain that there is
no definition or solemn judgment of the Church declaring it
1 Libe" de Fide (A.D. 413), 27, 29; ed. Ben., coIl. 313b, 314c. De octo
Dulcit. quaest. (A.D. 422) 12, 13: ibid. call. 219d, 220a. Repeated in
Enchiridion (? A.D. 423), LXIX; ibid. co!. 382b, c.
:I De Purgatorio, II, II.
8 Denzinger, Enchi"idion. ed. 1888. No. LXXIII.
Theol. Dogm.. VoL II, num. 206.
2I8 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
to be materia1. On this point again we find St. Thomas and
those who follow him involved in practically endless diffi-
culties and in, for us now, increasingly intolerable subtleties,
where they try to show how a material fire can affect an
immaterial spirit. Bossuet, so severely orthodox in all such
matters, preaching, before the Court, about sin becoming in
Hell the chastisement of the sinner, does not hesitate to
finish thus: " We bear within our hearts the instrument of our
punishment. 'Therefore have I brought forth a fire from the
nlidst of thee, it hath devoured thee' (Ezek. xxviii, I8). I
shall not send it against thee from afar, it \vill ignite in thy
conscience, its flames will arise from thy lnidst, and it will be
thy sins which will produce it." I-And the Abbé F. Dubois, in
a careful article in the Ecclesiastical Revue du Clergé Français
of Paris, has recently expressed the conviction that U the best
minds of our time, which are above being suspected of yielding
to mere passing fashions, feel the necessity of abandoning the
literal interpretation, judged to be insufficient, of the ancient
symbols; and of returning to a freer exegesis, of which some
of the Ancients have given us the example." 2 Among these
helpful" Ancients" we cannot but count Catherine, with her
One God \Vho is the Fire of Pain and the Light of Joy to
souls, according as they resist Him or will Him, either here or
hereafter.
III. GATHERINE AND ETERNAL PUNISHMENT
Introductory: four doctrines and difficulties to be considered.
Taking now the three great after-life conditions separately,
in the order of Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven, I wou]d first of
all note that some readers may be disappointed that Catherine
did not, like our own English Mystic, the entirely orthodox
optimist, Mother Juliana of Norwich-her Revelations belong
to the year I373 A.D.-simply proclaim that, whilst the teach-
ing and meaning of Christ and His Church would come true,
all, in ways known to God alone, would yet be well. 3 In this
manner, without any weakening of traditional teaching, the
1 æuvres. ed. Versailles, 1816, Vol. XI, p: 376.
I Le feu du Purgatoire est-il un feu, corporel? op
cit.. 1902, pp. 263-284;
270. I owe most of my references on this point to this paper.
3 Sixteen Revelations of Alother Juliana of Nmwich. 1373, ed. 1902.
pp. 73. 74, 7 8 .
AFTER-LIFE PROBLEMS AND DOCTRINES 219
whole dread secret as to the future of evil-doers is left in the
hands of God, and a beautifully boundless trust and hope
glows throughout those contemplations.
Yet, as I hope to show as we go along, certain assumptions
and conceptions, involved in the doctrine of Eternal Punish-
ment, cannot be systematically excluded, or even simply
ignored, without a grave weakening of the specifically Chris-
tian earnestness; and that, grand as is, in certain respects, the
idea of the Apocatastasis, the Final Restitution of all Things
and Souls-as taught by Clement and Origen-it is not, at
bottom, compatible with the whole drift, philosophy, and tone,
(even apart from specific sayings) of Our Lord. And this latter
teaching-of the simply abiding significance and effect of our
deliberate elections during this our one testing-time,-and not
that of an indefinite series of chances and purifications with
an ultimate disappearance of all difference between the results
of the \vorst life and the best, answers to the deepest postu-
lates and aspirations of the most complete and delicate ethical
and spiritual sense. For minds that can discriminate between
shifting fashions and solid grovvth in abiding truth, that will
patiently seek out the deepest instinct and simplest implica-
tions underlying the popular presentations of the Doctrine of
Abiding Consequences, and that take these implications as
but part of a larger whole: this doctrine still, and now
again, presents itseJf as a penn anent element of the full
religious consciousness.
It would certainly be unfair to press Catherine's rare and
incidental sayings on Hell into a formal system. Yet those
remarks are deep and suggestive, and help too much to
interpret, supplement, and balance her central, Purgatorial
teaching, and indeed to elucidate her general religious prin-
ciples, for us to be able to pass them over. We have already
sufficiently considered the question as to the nature of the
Fire; and that as to Evil Spirits is reserved for the next
Chapter. Here I shall consider four doctrines and difficulties,
together with Catherine's attitude towards them: the soul's
final fate, dependent upon the character of the will's act or
active disposition at the moment of the body's death; the
total moral perversion of the lost; the mitigation of their
pains; and the eternity of their punishment.
I. Eternity dependent on the earthly llfe's last moment.
Now as to the soul's final fate being made dependent upon
the character of that soul's particular act or disposition at the
220 THE
iYSTICAl, ELEMENT OF RELIGION
last moment previous to death, this teaching, prominent in
parts of the Trattato and V ita, goes back ultimately to Ezekiel,
who, as Prof. Charles interestingly shows, introduces a double
individualism into the older, Social and Organic, Eschatology
of the Hebrew Prophets. For l\lan is seen, by him, as respons-
ible for his own acts alone, and as himself working out
separately his own salvation or his own doom; and this indi-
vidual man again is looked at, not in his organic unity, but as
repeating himself in a succession of separate religious acts.
The individual act is taken to be a true expression of the
whole man at the moment of its occurrence: and hence, if
this act is ,vicked at the moment of the advent of the King-
dom, the agent will rightfully be destroyed; but if it be
righteous, he will be preserved. :L-Now the profound truth and
genuine advance thus proclaimed, who can doubt them? And
yet it is clear that the doctrine here is solidly true, only if
taken as the explicitation and supplement, and even in part
as the corrective, of the previously predominant teaching.
Take the Ezekielian doctrine as complete, even for its own
time, or as final over against the later, the Gospel depth of
teaching, (with its union of the social body and of individual
souls, and of the soul's single acts and of the general dis-
position produced by and reacting upon these acts), and
you get an all but solipsistic Individualism and an atomistic
Psychology, and you offend Christianity and Science equally.
I t is evident that Catherine, if she can fairly be taxed with
what, if pressed, would, in her doctrine rather than in her life,
be an excessive Individualism, is, in her general teaching and
practice, admirably free from Psychological Atomism; indeed
did any soul ever understand better the profound reality of
habits, general dispositions, tones of mind and feeling and
will, as distinct from the single acts that gradually build them
up and that, in return, are encircled and coloured by them
all? Her whole Purgatorial doctrine stands and falls by this
distinction, and this although, with a profound self-know-
ledge, she does not hesitate to make the soul express, in one
particular act after death,-that of the Plunge,-an even
deeper level of its true attitude of will and of its moral
character than is constituted by those imperfect habits of
the will, habits which it will take so much suffering and
acceptance of suffering gradually to rectify.
1 Ct'itical Histot'y oj the Doctt'ine oj a Future Life. 1 8 99. pp. 63. 64.
AFTER-LIFE PROBLEMS AND DOGTRINES 221
Thus the passages in which Catherine seems to teach that
God can and does, as it were, catch souls unawares, calling
them away, and finally deciding their fate on occasion of any
and every de facto volitional condition at the instant of
death, however little expressive of the radical determination
of that soul such an act or surface-state may be, will have,
(even if they be genuine, and most of them have doubtlessly
grown, perhaps have completely sprung up, under the pen of
sermonizing scribes,) to be taken as hortatory, hence as partly
hyperbolical. And such an admission will in nowise deny
the possibility for the soul to express i ts deliberate and full
disposition and determination in a single act or combination
of acts; nor that the other-world effects will follow according
to such deep, deliberate orientations of the character: it will
only deny that, at any and every moment, any and every act
of the soul sufficiently expresses its deliberate disposition.
Certainly it is comparatively rarely that the soul exerts its
full liberty, in an act of true, spiritual self-realization; and an
analogous rarity cannot but be postulated by religious philo-
sophy for contrary acts, of an approximately equal fulness of
deliberation and accuracy of representation, with regard to
the soul's volitional state. And yet the operative influence
towards such rare, fully self-expressive acts of the right kind,
and the aid towards similar, massive, and truly representative
volitions of the wrong kind, afforded by even quite ordinary
half-awake acts and habits of respectively good or evil quality
are so undeniable, and it is so impossible to draw a general
line as to where such wishes pass into full willings and
deliberate states: that the prevalence of a hortatory attitude
towards the whole subject is right and indeed inevitable.
2. The reprobate will of the lost.
As to Moral Perversion, the reprobate will of the lost,
we find that Catherine approaches the question from two
different, and at bottom, on this point, incompatible, systems;
but some incidental and short sayings of hers give us sug-
gesti ve hin ts towards a consistent position in this difficult
matter.
Catherine has a double approach. For, consistently with
the strong Neo-Platonist, Dionysian strain in her mind, she
frequently teaches and implies that Evil is the absence of
Good, of Love, and nothing positive at all. In this case Evil
would not only be less strong than good-only Manichaeans
would maintain that they were equal-but, as against the
222 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
constructive force of good, it would have no kind even of
destructive strength. Varying amounts, degrees, and kinds of
good, but good and only good, everywhere, would render all,
even transitory, pollution of the soul, and all, even passing,
purification of it, so much actual impossibility and theoretical
superstition. All that survived at all, could but be good;
and at most some good might be added, but no evil could be
removed, since none \vould exist.- Y et all this is, of course,
strongly denied and supplanted by the, at first sight, less
beautiful, but far deeper and alone fully Christian, position of
her specifically Purgatorial teaching. Here Evil is something
positive, an active disposition, orientation, and attachment of
the will; it is not without destructive force; and its cure is a
positive change in that will and its habits, and not a mere
addition of good. Yet it is plain that, even exclusively within
the implications of this deeper conviction, there is no neces-
sity to postulate unmixed evil in the disposition of any soul.
In some the evil would be triumphing over the good; in
others good would be triumphing over evil,-each over the
other, in every degree of good or of evil, up to the all but
complete extinction of all inclinations to evil or to good
respecti vely.
And Catherine has suggestive sayings. For one or two of
them go, at least in their implications, beyond a declaration
as to the presence of God's extrinsic mercy in Hell, a pres-
ence indicated by a mitigation of the souls' sufferings to
below what these souls deserve; and even beyond the
Areopagite's insistence upon the presence of some real good
in these souls, since he hardly gets beyond their continuous
possession of those non-moral goods, existence, intelligence,
and will-power.! For when she says, (( The ray of God's
mercy shines even in Hell," she need not, indeed, mean more
than that extrinsic mercy, and its effect, that mitigation. But
when she declares: (( if a creature could be found that did not
participate in the divine Goodness,-that creature would, as
it were, be as malignant as God is good," we cannot, I think,
a void applying this to the moral dispositions of such souls. 2
Now I know that St. Thomas had already taught, in at
first sight identical terms: (( Evil cannot exist (quite) pure
without the admixture of good, as the Supreme Good exists
free from all admixture of evil. . . . Those who are detained
1 Divine Names, eh. iv. sees. xxiii, xxiv: Parker, pp. 61- 6 4.
:I Vita, pp. 173b; 33 b .
AFTER-LIFE PROBLEl\fS AND DOCTRINES 223
in Hell, are not bereft of all good" ; 1 and yet he undoubtedly
maintained the complete depravation of the will's dispositions
in these souls. And, again, after Catherine's first declaration
there follo\v, (at least in the text handed do\vn in the Vita,)
words which explain that extrinsic mercy, not as mitigating
the finite amount of suffering due to the sinner, but as
turning the infinite suffering due to the sinner's infinite
malice, into a finite, though indefinite amount; and hence,
in the second declaration, a corresponding interior mercy
may be signified-God's grace preventing the sinner from
being infinitely wicked.
But Catherine, unlike St. Thomas, expressly speaks not
only of Good and Evil, but of Good and Malignancy; and
l\tlalignancy undoubtedly refers to dispositions of the will.
And even if the words, now found as the sequel to the first
saying, be authentic, they belong to a different occasion, and
cannot be allowed to force the meaning of words spoken at
another time. In this latter saying the words (( as it were"
show plainly that she is not thinking of a possible infiniteness
of human wickedness which has been changed, through God's
mercy, to an actual finitude of evil; but is simply asking
herself whether a man could be, not infinitely but wholly,
malignant. For she answers that, were this possible, a man
would (( as it were" be as malignant as God is good, and thus
shows that the malignancy, which she denies, would only in a
sense form a counterpart to God's benevolence: since, though
the man would be as entirely malignant as God is entirely
good, God would still remain infinite in His goodness as
against the finitude of Man's wickedness.
The difficulties of such a combination of convictions are, of
course, numerous and great. Psychologically it seems hard
to understand why this remnant of good disposition should
be unable to germinate further and further good, so that, at
last, good would leaven the whole soul. From the point of
view of any Theodicy, it appears difficult to justify the un-
ending exclusion of such a soul from growth in, and the
acquirement of, a predominantly good will and the happiness
that accompanies such a will. And the testimony of Our
Lord Himself and of the general doctrine of the Church
appear definitely opposed: for does not His solemn declara-
tion : U Hell, where their worm dieth not" (Mark ix, 48), find
1 Summa Theol., suppl.. quo 69, art. 7 ad 9.
224 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
its authoritative interpretation in the common Church teach-
ing as to the utterly reprobate will of the lost? And indeed
Catherine herself, in her great saying that if but one little
drop of Love could fall into Hell (that is, surely, if but the
least beginning of a right disposition towards God could
enter those souls) Hell would be turned into Heaven, seems
clearly to endorse this position.
And yet, we have full experience in this life of genuinely
good dispositions being present, and yet not triumphing or
even spreading within the soul; of such conditions being, in
various degrees, our own fault; and of such defeat bringing
necessarily with it more or less of keen suffering.-There
would be no injustice if, after a full, good chance and sufficient
aid had been given to the soul to actualize its capabilities of
spiritual self-constitution, such a soul's deliberately sporadic,
culpably non-predominant, good did not, even eventually, lead
to the full satisfaction of that soul's essential cravings.-The
saying attributed to Our Lord, which appears in St. Mark
alone, is a pure quotation from Isaiah lxvi, 24 and Ecclesiasti-
cus vii, 17, and does not seem to require more than an abiding
distress of conscience, an eternal keenness of remorse.
Again, the common Church-teaching is undoubtedly voiced
by St. Thomas in the words, {( Since these souls are completely
averse to the final end of right reason, they must be declared
to be without any good will." Yet St. Thomas himself
(partly in explanation of the Areopagite's words, {( the evil
spirits desire the good and the best, namely, to be, to live, and
to understand "), is obliged to distinguish between such souls'
deliberate will and their (( natural will and inclination," and to
proclaim that this latter, (( which is not from themselves but
from the Author of nature, who put this inclination into
nature. . . can indeed be good." 1 And, if we would not con-
struct a scheme flatly contradictory of all earthly experience,
we can hardly restrict the soul, even in the beyond, to entirely
indeliberate, good inclinations, and to fully deliberate, bad
volitions, but cannot help interposing an indefinite variety
of inchoative energizings, half-wishes, and the like, and think-
ing of these as mixed with good and evil. Indeed this con-
clusion seems also required by the common teaching that the
suffering there differs from soul to soul, and this because of
the different degrees of the guilt: for such degrees depend
1 Dionysius. Divine Names. ch. iv. sec. xxiü: Parker. p. 63. St.
Thomas. Summa Theol.. suppl.. quo 98. art. I. in corp.
AFTER-LIFE PROBLEl\iS AND DOCTRINES 225
undoubtedly even more upon the degree of deliberation and
massiveness of the will than upon the degree of objective bad-
ness in the deed, and hence can hardly fail to leave variously
small or large fragments of more or less good and imperfectly
deliberate wishings and energizings present in the soul.
And finally Catherine's U little drop of Love" would, she
says, U at once" turn Hell into Heaven, and hence cannot
mean some ordinary good moral disposition or even such
supernatural virtues as theological Faith and Hope, but Pure
Love alone, which latter queen of all the virtues she is
explicitly discussing there. Thus she in nowise requires the
absence from these souls of a certain remnant of semi-deliberate
virtue of a less exalted, and not necessarily regenerative kind.
3. Mitigation of the sufferings of the lost.
As to the l\iitigation of the Suffering, it is remarkable that
Catherine, who has been so bold concerning the source of the
pains, and the dispositions, of the lost souls, does not more
explicitly teach such an alleviation. I say ({ remarkable,"
because important Fathers and Churches, that were quite un-
infected by Origenism, have held and have acted upon such a
doctrine. St. Augustine, in his Enchiridion (423 A.D. (?))
tells us that U in so far as " the Offering of the Sacrifice of the
Altar and Alms U profit" souls in the beyond, (( they profit
them by procuring a full remission (of the punishment), or at
least that their damnation may become more tolerable." And
after warning men against believing in an end to the suffer-
ings of the lost, he adds: (( But let them consider, if they like,
that the sufferings of the damned are somewhat mitigated
during certain intervals of time." :L-Saints John Chrysostom
and John Damascene, thoroughly orthodox Greek Fathers,
and the deeply devout hymn-writer Prudentius among the
Latins, teach similar doctrine; and in many ancient Latin
missals, ranging from the eleventh to the fourteenth century,
prayers for the Mitigation of the Sufferings of the Damned
are to be found. 2
Hence the great Jesuit Theologian Petau, though not him-
self sharing this view, can declare: {{ Concerning such a
breathing-time (respiratio) of lost souls, nothing certain has as
1 Enchiridion, ex, ed. Ben., col. 403c; eXII, col. 404c.
2 The passages here referred to will be found carefully quoted and dis-
cussed in Petavius's great Dogmata Theologica, De Angelis, III, vili.
16, 17. with Zaccaria's important note (ed. Fournials. 1866. Vol. IV.
pp. 119- 121 ).
VOL. II. g
226 THE MYSTIGAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
yet been decreed by the Catholic Church, so that this opinion
of most holy Fathers should not temerariously be rejected as
absurd, even though it be foreign to the common opinion of
Catholics in our time." 1 And the Abbé Emery, that great
Catholic Christian, the second founder of St. Sulpice, who died
in 1811, showed, in a treatise On the Mitigation of the Pains of
the Dan'lned, that this view had also been held by certain
Scholastic Theologians, and had been defended, without any
opposition, by Mark of Ephesus, in the Sessions of the
Council of Florence (1439 A.D.); and concluded that this
doctrine was not contrary to the Catholic Faith and did not
deserve any censure. The most learned Theologians in Rome
found nothing reprehensible in this treatise, and Pope Pius
VII caused his Theologian, the Barnabite General, Padre
Fontana, to thank M. Emery for the copy sent by him to the
Holy Father. 2
Catherine herself cannot well have been thinking of any-
thing but some such Mitigation when she so emphatically
teaches that God's mercy extends even into Hell. Indeed,
even the continuation of this great saying in the present
V ita-text fonnally teaches such l\fitigation, yet practically
withdraws it, by making it consist in a rebate and change,
from an infinitude in degree and duration into a finitude in
degree though not in duration. 3 But, as we have already
found, this highly schematic statement is doubtless one of
the later glosses, in which case her true meaning must
have been substantially that of the Fathers referred to, viz.
that the suffering, taken as anyhow finite in its degree, gets
mercifully mitigated for these souls.-And, if she was here
also faithful to her general principles, she will have con-
ceived the mitigation, not as simply sporadic and arbitrary,
but as more or less progressive, and connected with the
presence in these souls of those various degrees of semi-
voluntary good inclinations and wishes, required by her other
saying. Even if these wishings could slowly and slightly
increase, and the sufferings could similarly decrease, this
would in nowise imply or require a final full rectification of
the deliberate will itself, and hence not a complete extinction
of the resultant suffering. Hell would still remain essentially
1 Dogmata Theologica, Vol. IV. p. 120b. See also the interesting note
in the Benedictine Edition of St. Augustine, Vol. VI, col. 403.
I Vie de M. Emery, by M. Gosselin, Paris, 1862. Vol. II, pp. 322-324.
· Vita (Trattato). p. 173b.
AFTER-LIFE PROBLEMS AND DOCTRINES 227
distinct from Purgatory; for in Purgatory the deliberate,
acti ve will is good from the first, and only the various semi-
volitions and old habits are imperfect, but are being gradually
brought into full harmony with that will, by the now com-
plete willing of the soul; and hence this state has an end;
whereas in Hell the deliberate, active will is bad from the
first, and only various partially deliberate wishes and ten-
dencies are good, but cannot be brought to fruition in a full
virtuous determination of the dominant character of the soul,
and hence this state has no end.
4. The Endlessness of Hell.
And lastly, as to the Endlessness of this condition of the
Lost, it is, of course, plain that Catherine held this defined
doctrine; and again, that (( the chief weight, in the Church-
teaching as to Hell, rests upon Hell's Eternity." 1
Here I would suggest five groups of considerations:
(I) Precisely this Eternity appears to be the feature of all
others which is ever increasingly decried by contemporary
philosophy and liberal theology as impossible and revolting.
Thus it is frequently argued as though, not the indiscriminate-
ness nor the materiality nor the forensic externality nor the
complete fixity of the sufferings, nor again the complete
malignity of the lost were incredible, and hence the unending-
ness of such conditions were impossible of acceptance; but,
on the contrary, as though,-be the degree and nature of those
sufferings conceived as ever so discriminated, spiritual, interior
and relatively mobile, and as occasioned and accompanied by
a disposition in which semi-voluntary good is present,-the
simple assumption of anything unending or final about them,
at once renders the whole doctrine impossible to believe. It
is true that Tennyson and Browning take the doctrine simply
in its popular Calvinistic form, and then reject it; and even
John Stuart Mill and Frederick Denison l\faurice hardly con-
sider the eternity separately. But certainly that thoughtful
and religious-minded writer, Mr. W. R. Greg, brings forward
the eternity-doctrine as, already in itself, (( a curiosa infelicitas
which is almost stupidity on the part of the Church." 2
(2) Yet it is plain how strongly, even in Mr. Greg's case,
the supposed (local, physical, indiscrin1Ïnate, etc.) nature of
the state affects the writer's judgment as to the possibility of
its unendingness,-as indeed is inevitable. And it is even
1 So Atzberger, in Scheeben's Dogmatik, Vol. IV (1903), p. 826.
I Enigmas of Life. ed. 1892. p. 255.
228 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
clearer, I think, that precisely this eternity-doctrine stands for
a truth which is but an ever-present mysterious corollary to
every deeply ethical or spiritual, and, above all, every speci-
ficallyChristian view of life. For every such view comes, surely,
into hopeless collision with its own inalienable requirements if
it will hold that the deepest ethical and spiritual acts and con-
di tions are, -a vowed] y performed though they be in time and
space-simply temporary in their inmost nature and effects;
whereas every vigorously ethical religion, in so far as it has
reached a definite personal-immortality doctrine at all, cannot
admit that the soul's deliberate character remains without any
strictly final and permanent results. The fact is that we get
here to a profound ethical and spiritual postulate, which
cannot be adequately set aside on the ground that it is the
product of barbarous ages and vindictive minds, since this
objection applies only to the physical picturings, the indis-
criminateness, non-mitigation, and utter reprobation; or on
the ground that a long, keen purification, hence a temporally
finite suffering, would do as well, since, when all this has com
pletely passed away, there would be an entire obliteration
of all difference in the consequences of right and wrong; or
that acts and dispositions built up in time cannot have other
than finite consequences, since this is to naturalize radically
the deepest things of life; or finally that (( Evil," as the Areo-
pagite would have it, (( is not,"! since thus the very existence
of the conviction as to free-will and sin becomes more in-
explicable than the theoretical difficulties against Libertarian-
ism are insoluble.-Against this deep requirement of the most
alert and complete ethical and spiritual life the wave of any
Apocatastasis-doctrine or -emotion will, in the long run, ever
break itself in vain.
(3) The doctrine of Conditional Immortality has, I think,
many undeniable advantages over every kind of Origenism.
This view does not, as is often imputed to it, believe in the
annihilation by Omnipotence of the naturally immortal souls
of impenitent grave sinners; but simply holds that human
souls begin with the capacity of acquiring, with the help
of God's Spirit, a spiritual personality, built up out of the
mere possibilities and partial tendencies of their highly mixed
natures, which, if left uncultivated and untranscended, become
definitely fixed at the first, phenomenal, merely individual
1 Divine Nctm.es. ch. iv. sees. 23, 24: Parker, pp. 70. 71.
AFTER-LIFE PROBLEMS AND DOCTRINES 229
level,-so that spiritual personality alone deserves to live on
and does so, whilst this animal individuality does not deserve
and does not do so. The soul is thus not simply born as, but
can become more and more, that "inner man JJ who alone
persists, indeed who" is renewed day by day, even though our
outward man perish. JJ 1
This conception thus fully retains, indeed increases, the
profound ultimate difference between the results of spiritual
and personal, and of animal and simply individual life re-
spectively,-standing,as it does, at the antipodes to Origenism;
it eliminates all unmoralized, unspiritualized elements from
the ultimate world, without keeping souls in an apparently
fruitless suffering; and it gives full emphasis to a supremely
important, though continually forgotten fact,-the profoundly
expensive, creative, positive process and nature of spiritual
character. No wonder, then, that great thinkers and scholars,
such as Goethe, Richard Rothe, Heinrich Holtzmann, and
some Frenchmen and Englishmen have held this view. 2
Yet the objections against this view, taken in its strictness,
are surely conclusive. For how can an originally simply
mortal substance, force, or entity become immortal, and a
phenomenal nature be leavened by a spiritual principle
which, ex hypothesi, is not present within it? And how
misleadingly hyperbolical, according to this, would be the
greatest spiritual exhortations, beginning with those of Our
Lord Himself !
(4) And yet the conception of Conditional Immortality
cannot be far from the truth, since everything, surely, points
to a lowered consciousness in the souls in question, or at
least to one lower than that in the ultimate state of the saved.
This conception of the shrunken condition of these souls was
certainly held by Catherine, even if the other, the view of a
heightened, consciousness, appears in hortatory passages which
just tnay be authentic; and indeed only that conception is
conformable with her fundamental position that love alone is
fully positive and alone gives vital strength, and that all fully
deliberate love is absent from the lost souls. And if we
1 2 Cor. iv, 16.
2 See H. J. Holtzmann, Richard Rothe's Sþeculatives System, 1899,
pp. 110. III; 123. 124;-Georg Class. Phãnomenologie und 011tologie des
Menschlichen Geistes, 1896, pp. 220, 221 ;-and that strange mixture of
stimulating thought, deep earnestness, and fantastic prejudice. Edward
White's Life of Christ, ed. ):876.
230 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
consider how predominantly hortatory in tone and object the
ordinary teaching on this point cannot fail to be; and, on the
other hand, how close to Manichaeism, any serious equating
of the force and intensity of life and consciousness between
the Saved and the Lost would be, we can hardly fail to find
ourselves free, indeed compelled, to hold a lesser consciousness
for the Lost than for the Saved. Whilst the joyful life of the
Saved would range, in harmonious intensity, beyond all that
we can experience here, the painful consciousness of the Lost
would be, in various degrees, indefinitely less. The Saved
would thus not be only other than the Lost, they would
actually be 'Inore: for God is Life supreme, and, where there
is m
re affinity with God, there is more life, and more
conSCIousness.
(5) But, if the view just stated is the more likely one, then
we cannot soften the sufferings of those souls, by giving them
a sense of Eternity, of one unending momentary Now, instead
of our earthly sense of Succession, as Cardinal Newman and
Father Tyrrell have attempted to do, in a very instructive
and obviously orthodox manner. 1 I shall presently argue
strongly in favour of some consciousness of Eternity being
traceable in our best moments here, and of this consciousness
being doubtless more extended in the future blessed life.
But here I have only to consider whether for one who, like
Catherine, follows the analogy of earthly experience, the Lost
should be considered nearer to, or further from, such a T otum-
Simul consciousness than we possess now, here below, at our
best? And to this the answer must, surely, be that they are
further away from it. Yet God in His Mercy may allow this
greater successiveness, if unaccompanied by any keen memory
or prevision, to help in effecting that mitigation of the
suffering which we have already allowed.
IV. CATHERINE AND PURGATORY.
I. Introductory.
(1) Changed feeling concerning Purgatory.
In the matter of a Purgatory, a very striking return of
religious feeling towards its normal equilibrium has been
occurring in the most unexpected, entirely unprejudiced
I Grammar of Assent. 187c p. 417- Hard Sayings, 18g8. p. 113.
AFTER-LIFE PROBLEMS AND DOCTRINES 23I
quarters, within the last century and a half. In Germany
we have Lessing, who, in the wake of Leibniz, encourages the
acceptance of " that middle state which the greater part of
our fellow-Christians have adopted": Schleiermacher, who
calls the overpassing of a middle state by a violent leap at
death" amagicalproceeding"; DavidF. Strauss, who entirely
agrees; Carl von Hase, who, in his very Manual of Anti-
Roman Polemics admits that" most men when they die are
probably too good for Hell, but they are certainly too bad
for Heaven"; the delicately thoughtful philosopher Fechner
who, in the most sober-minded of his religious works, insists
upon our" conceiving the life beyond according to the analogy
of this-life conditions," and refers wistfully to It the belief
which is found amongst all peoples and is quite shrunken
only among Protestants-that the living can still do some-
thing to aid the dead"; and Prof. Anrich, probably the
greatest contemporary authority on the Hellenic elements
incorporated in Christian doctrine, declares, all definite
Protestant though he is, that" legitimate religious postulates
underlie the doctrine of Purgatory." 1 And in England that
sensitively religious Unitarian, W. R. Greg, tells us" Purgatory,
ranging from a single day to a century of ages, offers that
borderland of discriminating retribution for which justice and
humanity cry out"; and the Positivist, John Stuart Mill,
declares at the end of his life: It All the probabilities in case
of a future life are that such as we have been made or have
made ourselves before the change, such we shall enter into
the life hereafter. . . . To imagine that a miracle will be
wrought at death. . . making perfect everyone whom it is
His will to include among His elect . . . is utterly opposed
to every presumption that can be adduced from the light of
nature. JJ 2
(2) Causes of the previous prefudice.
Indeed the general principle of ameliorative suffering is so
1 G. E. Lessing, "Leibniz von den Ewigen Strafen," in Lessing'&
Såmmtliche We"ke, ed. Lachmann-Muncker, 1895, Vol. XI. p. 486. D. F.
Strauss, Die ch"istliche Glaubenslehre, 1841. Vol. II, pp. 684, 685. Carl
von Hase, Ha11dbuch de" protesta11tischen Polemik, ed. 1864, p. 422.
G. T. Fechner. Die d"ei G"ünde und Motive des Glaubens, 186 3, pp. 146.
147, 177. G. Anrich, II Clemens und Origenes. als Begründer der Lehre
vom Fegfeuer/. in Theologische Abhandlungen fü" H. J. Holtzmann. 1902.
p. 120.
2 W. R. Greg, Enigmas of LiJe, ed. 1892. pp. 256. 257, 259. J. S. Mill.
Three Essays on Religion. ed. 1874, p. 211.
.
232 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
obviously true and inexhaustibly profound that only many,
long-lived abuses in the practice, and a frequent obscura-
tion in the teaching, of the doctrine, can explain and excuse
the sad neglect, indeed discredit, inte> which the very principle
and root-doctrine has fallen among well-nigh one-half of
Western Christendom. As to the deplorably widespread
existence, at the time of the Protestant Reformation, of both
these causes, which largely occasioned or strengthened each
other, we have the unimpeachable authority of the Council
of Trent itself: for it orders the Bishops It not to permit
that uncertain doctrines, or such as labour under the pre-
sumption of falsity, be propagated and taught," and It to
prohibit, as so many scandals and stones of stumbling for the
faithful, whatever belongs to a certain curiosity or superstition
or savours of filthy lucre." 1 The cautious admissions of the
strictly Catholic scholar-theologian, Dr. N. Paulus, and the
precise documentary additions and corrections to Paulus
furnished, directly from the contemporary documents, by the
fair-minded Protestant worker at Reformation History, Prof.
T. Brieger, now furnish us, conjointly, with the most vivid
and detailed picture of the sad subtleties and abuses which
gave occasion to that Decree. 2
(3) Catherine's þurgatorial conceptions avoid those causes.
Her conceptions harbour two currents of thought.
It is surely not a small recommendation of Catherine's
mode of conceiving Purgatory, that it cuts, as we shall see, at
the very root of those abuses. Yet we must first face certain
opposite dangers and ambiguities which are closely intertwined
with the group of terms and images taken over, for the
purpose of describing an immanental Purgation, by her and
her great Alexandrian Christian predecessors, from the Greek
Heathen world. And only after the delimitation of the
defect in the suggestions which still so readily operate from
out of these originally Hellenic ideas, can we consider the
difficulties and imperfections peculiar to the other, in modem
times the predominant, element in the complete teaching as
to the Middle State, an element mostly of Jewish and Roman
provenance, and aiming at an extrinsically punitive concep-
tion. Both currents can be properly elucidated only if we
first take them historically.
1 Sess. XXV, Decret. de Purgatorio. med.
I N. Paulus. Johann Tetzel. 1899. Brieger's review. Theologische
Literatur-Zeitung. 1900, colI. 117. 118.
AFTER-LIFE PROBLEMS AND DOCTRINES 233
I. Jewish prayers for the dead.
It is admitted on all hands that, in the practical form
of Prayers for the Dead, the general doctrine of a Middle
State can be traced back, in Judaism, up to the important
passage in the Second Book of Maccabees, c. xii, vv. 43-45,
where Judas Maccabaeus sends about two thousand drachms
of silver to Jerusalem, in order that a Sin-Offering may be
offered up for the Jews fallen in battle against Gorgias, upon
whose bodies heathen amulets had been found. U He did
excellently in this . . . it is a holy and devout thought.
Hence he instituted the Sin-Offering for the dead, that they
might be loosed from their sins." That battle occurred in
166 B.C., and this book appears to have been written in
124 B.C., in Egypt, by a Jew of the school of the Pharisees.
Now it is difficult not to recognize, in the doctrinal com-
ment upon the facts here given, rather as yet the opinions of
a J udaeo-Alexandrian circle, which was small even at the time
of the composition of the comment, than the general opinion
of Judaism at the date of Judas's act. For if this act had
been prompted by a clear and generally accepted conviction
as to the resurrection, and the efficacy of prayers for the dead,
the writer would have had no occasion or inclination to make
an induction of his own as to the meaning and worth of that
act; and we should find some indications of such a doctrine
and practice in the voluminous works of Philo and Josephus,
some century and a half later on. But all such indications
are wanting in these writers.
And in the New Testament there is, with regard to helping
the dead, only that curious passage: U If the dead are not
raised at all, why then are they baptized for them? " 1
where St. Paul refers, without either acceptance or blame, to
a contemporary custom among Christian Proselytes from
Paganism, who offered up that bath of initiation for the
benefit of the souls of deceased relatives who had died without
any such purification. Perhaps not till Rabbi Akiba's time,
about 130 A.D., had prayers for the dead become part of the
regular Synagogue ritual. By 200 A.D. Tertullian speaks of
the practice as of an established usage among the Christian
communities: U we make oblations for the Dead, on their
anniversary, every year"; although U if you ask where is the
law concerning this custom in Scripture, you cannot read of
I I Cor. xv. 29.
234 THE MYSTICAL ELE
fENT OF RELIGION
any such there. Tradition will appear before you as its
initiator, custom as its confirmer, and faith as its observer." 1
It is interesting to note how considerably subsequent to the
practice is, in this instance also, its clear doctrinal justification.
Indeed the Jews are, to this hour, extraordinarily deficient
in explicit, harmonious conceptions on the matter. Certainly
throughout Prof. W. Bacher's five volumes of Sayings of the
Jewish Rabbis from 30 B.C. to 400 A.D., I can only find the
following saying, by Jochanan the Amoraean, who died
279 A.D.: It There are three books before God, in which men are
inscribed according to their merit and their guilt: that of the
perfectly devout, that of the perfect evil-doers, and that of the
middle, the uncertain souls. The devout and the evil-doers
receive their sentence on New Year's day. . . the first, unto
life; the second, unto death. As to middle souls, their
sentence remains in suspense till the day of Atonement: if
by then they have done penance, they get written down
alongside of the devout; if not, they are written down along-
side of the evil-doers." 2
2. Alexandrine Fathers on Purgatory.
Yet it is the Platonizing Alexandrian Fathers Clement and
Origen (they died, respectively, in about 215 A.D. and in 254
A.D.), who are the first, and to this hour the most important,
Christian spokesmen for a state of true intrinsic purgation.
\Ve have already deliberately rejected their Universalism;
but this error in no way weakens the profound truth of their
teaching as to the immanental, necessary interconnection
between suffering and morally imperfect habits, and as to the
ameliorative effects of suffering where, as in Purgatory, it is
willed by a right moral determination. Thus Clement: It As
children at the hands of their teacher or father, so also are we
punished by Providence. God does not avenge Himself, for
vengeance is to repay evil by evil, but His punishment aims
at our good." It Although a punishment, it is an emendation
of the soul." It The training which men call punishments." 3
And Origen: It The fury of God's vengeance profits unto the
purification of souls; the punishment is unto purgation."
1 De Corona. III. IV. See M. Salomon Reinach's interesting paper.
u l'Origine des Prières pour les Morts," in Cultes, Mythes. et Religions.
19 0 5, pp. 3 1 6-331.
2 W. Bacher. Die Agada det' palästinenischen Amorãet'. Vol. I, 1892.
p. 33 1 .
3 Strom.. VII, 26 (Migne, Set'. Gt'aec, Vol. IX, col. 541); I. 26 (ibid.
Vol. VIII. col. 916); VII. 26 (ibid. Vol. IX. col. 540).
AFTER-LIFE PROBLEMS AND DOCTRINES 235
" These souls receive, in the prison, not the retribution of
their folly, bu t a benefaction in the purification from the
evils contracted in that folly,-a purification effected by
means of salutary troubles." 1
Now Clement is fully aware of the chief source for his
formulation of these deeply spiritual and Christian instincts
and convictions. "Plato speaks well when he teaches that
( men who are punished, experience in truth a benefit: for
those who get justly punished, profit through their souls
becoming better.' "2 But Plato, in contradistinction from
Clement, holds that this applies only to such imperfect souls
as " have sinned curable sins "; he has a Hell as well as a
Purgatory: yet his Purgatory, as Clement's, truly purges: the
souls are there because they are partially impure, and they
cease to be there when they are completely purified.
And Plato, in his turn, makes no secret as to whence he got
his suggestions and raw materials, viz. the Orphic priesthood
and its literature, which, ever since the sixth century B.C., had
been succeeding to and supplanting the previous Orgiastic
Dionysianism. 3 Plato gives us vivid pictures of their doings
in Athens, at the time of his writing, in about 380 B.C.
" Mendicant prophets go to rich men's doors, and persuade
these men that they have a power committed to them of
making an atonement for their sins, or for those of their
fathers, by sacrifices and incantations. . . and they persuade
whole cities that expiations and purifications of sin may be
made by sacrifices and amusements which fill a vacant hour,
and are equally at the service of the living and the dead." '-
Yet from these men, thus scorned as well-nigh sheer impostors,
Plato takes over certain conceptions and formulations which
contribute one of the profoundest, still unexhausted elements
to his teaching,-although this element is, at bottom, in
conflict with that beautiful but inadequate, quite anti-Orphic,
conception of his-the purely negative character of Evil.
For the Orphic literary remains, fragmentary and late though
they be, plainly teach that moral or ritual transgressions are
a defilement of the soul, an infliction of positive stains upon
it; that these single offences and II spots" produce a generally
1 De Princ.. II, 10. 6. De Orat., XXIX, p. 263.
I Paedag., I, 8, p. 51; and Plato. Gorgias. p. 477a.
a I owe here almost everything to the truly classical account in Rohde.s
Psyche. ed. 1898, Vol. II, pp. 1-136.
& Republic, II. p. 364b. c, I.
.
..
236 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
sinful and It spotted" condition; and that this condition is
amenable to and requires purification by suffering,-water, or
more frequently fire, which wash or burn out these stains of
sin. So Plutarch (who died about 120 A.D.) still declares that
the souls in" Hades have stains of different colours according
to the different passions; and the object of the purificatory
punishment is " that, these stains having been worn away,
the soul may become altogether resplendent." And Virgil,
when he declares" the guilt which infects the soul is washed
out or burnt out. . . until a long time-span has effaced the
clotted stain, and leaves the heavenly conscience pure" : is
utilizing an Orphic-Pythagorean Hades-book. 1
This conception of positive stains is carefully taken over
by the Alexandrian Fathers: Clement speaks of " removing,
by continuous prayer, the stains ("'TJÀíôaç) contracted through
former sins," and declares that "the Gnostic," the perfect
Christian, " fears not death, having purified himself from all
the spots (U7ríÀovç) on his soul." And Origen describes It the
pure soul that is not weighed down by leaden weights of
wickedness," where the spots have turned to leaden pellets
such as were fastened to fishing-nets. Hence, says Clement,
" post-baptismal sins have to be purified out" of the soul;
and, says Origen, " these rivers of fire are declared to be of
God, who causes the evil that is mixed up with the whole
soul to disappear from out of it." 2
In Pseudo-Dionysius the non-Orphic, purely negative, view
prevails: "Evi] is neither in demons nor in us as an existent
evil, but as a failure and dearth in the perfection of our own
proper goods." And St. Thomas similarly declares that
" different souls have correspondingly different stains, like
shadows differ in accordance with the difference of the bodies
which interpose themselves between the light." 3
But Catherine, in this inconsistent with her own general
Privation-doctrine, again conceives the stain, the It macchia
del peccato," as Cardinal Manning has acutely observed, not
simply as a deprivation of the light of glory, but" as the cause,
not the effect, of God's not shining into the soul" : it includes
1 I take these passages from Anrich's Clemens und Origenes. Ope cit.
p. 102, n. 5.
2 Clemens, Strom., V, 3, p. 236. Origen, Contra Cels.. VII. 13. Clemens.
Strom., IV, 24. Origen, Contra Cels.. IV. 13.
I Dionysius, Divine Names, ch. iv. sec. 24: Parker. p. 64. St. Thomas.
$umma Theol.. I, ü. quo 86. art. 1 ad 3 et conc!.
AFTER-LIFE PROBLEMS AND DOCTRINES 237
in it the idea of an imperfection, weakness with regard to
virtue, bad (secondary) dispositions, and unheavenly tastes. l
3. The true and the false in the OrPhic conception.
Now precisely in this profoundly true conception of Positive
Stain there lurk certain dangers, which all proceed from the
original Orphic diagnosis concerning the source of these
stains, and these dangers will have to be carefully guarded
against.
(I) The conviction as to the purificatory power of fire
was no doubt, originally, the direct consequence from the
Orphic belief as to the intrinsically staining and imprisoning
effect of the body upon the soul. It The soul, as the Orphics
say, is enclosed in the body, in punishment for the punishable
acts"; II liberations" from the body, and II purifications" of
the living and the dead, ever, with them, proceed together.
And hence to burn the dead body was considered to purify
the soul that had been stained by that prison-house: the slain
Clytemnestra, says Euripides, II is purified, as to her body, by
fire," for, as the Scholiast explains, II fire purifies all things,
and burnt bodies are considered holy." 2 And such an
intensely anti-body attitude we find, not only fully developed
later on into a deliberate anti- Incarnational doctrine, among
the Gnostics, but, as we have already seen, slighter traces of
this same tone may be found in the (doubtless Alexandrian)
Book of Wisdom, and in one, not formally doctrinal passage,
a momentary echo of it, in St. Paul himself. And Catherine's
attitude is generally, and often strongly, in this direction.
(2) A careful distinction is evidently necessary here. The
doctrine that sin defiles,-affects the quality of the soul's
moral and spiritual dispositions, and that this defilement and
perversion, ever occasioned by the search after facile pleasure
or the flight from fruitful pain, can normally be removed, and
corrected only by a long discipline of fully accepted, gradually
restorative pain, either here, or hereafter, or both: are pro-
found anticipations, and have been most rightly made integral
parts, of the Christian life and conception. The doctrine that
the body is essentially a mere accident or superaddition or
necessary defilement to the soul, is profoundly untrue, in its
exaggeration and one-sidedness: for if the body is the occasion
of the least spiritual of our sins, it can and should become the
1 Treatise on PUf'gatory, by St. Catherine of Genoa, ed. 1880, p. 31.
I Plato. Cratylus, p. 400c. Republic, II, p. 364e. Euripides. Of'estes,
XXX. seg., with Schol. Rohde. Ope cit.. Vol. II. p. 101. n. 2.
,
238 11-IE
f'{STICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
chief servant of the spirit; the slow and difficult training of
this servant is one of the most important means of develop-
ment for the soul itself; and many faults and vices are not
occasioned by the body at all, whilst none are directly and
necessarily caused by it. Without the body, we should not have
impurity, but neither should we have specifically human purity
of soul; and without it, given the persistence and activity of
the soul, there could be as great, perhaps greater, pride and
soliPsisnl, the most anti-Christian of all the vices. Hence if,
in Our Lord's teaching, we find no trace of a Gnostic desire
for purification from all things bodily as essentially soul-
staining, we do find a profound insistence upon purity of
heart, and upon the soul's real, active" turning," conversion,
(an interior change from an un- or anti-moral attitude to an
ethical and spiritual dependence upon God), as a sine qua non
condition for entrance into the Kingdom of Heaven. And
the Joannine teachings re-affirm this great truth for us as a
Metabasis, a moving from Death over to Life.
4. Catherine's conceptions as to the character of the stains and
of their þurgation.
And this idea, as to intrinsic purgation through suffering
of impurities contracted by the soul, can be kept thoroughly
Christian, if we ever insist, with Catherine in her most
emphatic and deepest teachings, that Purgation can and
should be effected in this life, hence in the body,-in and
through all the right uses of the body, as well as in and
through all the legitimate and will-strengthening abstentions
from such uses; that the subject-matter of such purgation are
the habits and inclinations contrary to our best spiritual Jights,
and which we have largely ourselves built up by our variously
perverse or slothful acts, but which in no case are directly
caused by the body, and in many cases are not even occa-
sioned by it; and, finally, that holiness consists primarily,
not in the absence of faults, but in the presence of spiritual
force, in Love creative, Love triumphant,-the soul becoming
flame rather than snow, and dwelling upon what to do,
give and be, rather than upon what to shun.-Catherine's
predominant, ultimate tone possesses this profound positive-
ness, and corrects all but entirely whatever, if taken alone,
would appear to render the soul's substantial purity impossible
in this life; to constitute the body a direct and necessary
cause of impurity to the soul; and to find the ideal of per-
fection in the negative condition of being free from stain.
AFTER-LIFE PROBLEMS AND DOCTRINES 239
In her greatest sayings, and in her actual life, Purity is found
to be Love, and this Love is exercised, not only in the inward,
home-coming, recollective movement,-in the purifying of the
soul's dispositions, but also in the outgoing, world-visiting,
dispersive movement,-in action towards fellow-souls.
5. ] udaeo-Roman conception of Purgatory.
And this social side and movement brings us to the second
element and current in the complete doctrine of a Middle
State,-aconstituentwhich possesses affinities and advantages,
and produces excesses and abuses, directly contrary to those
proper to the element of an intrinsic purgation.
(I) Here we get early Christian utilizations, for purposes of
a doctrine concerning the Intermediate State, of sayings and
images which dwell directly only upon certain extrinsic
consequences of evil-doing, or which, again, describe a future
historical and social event,-the Last Day. For already
Origen interprets, in his beautiful Treatise on Prayer, XXIX,
16, Our Lord's words as to the debtor: H And thou be cast
into prison . . . thou shalt by no means come out thence, till
thou hast paid the last farthing," Matt. v, 25, 26, as
applying to Purgatory. And in his Contra Celsu1n, VII, 13,
he already takes, as the Biblical locus classicus for a Purgatory,
St. Paul's words as to how men build, upon the one foundation
Christ, either gold, silver, gems, or wood, hay, stubble; and
how fire will test each man's work; and, if the work remain,
he shall receive a reward, but if it be burnt, he shall suffer
loss and yet he himself shall be saved yet so as by fire, I Cor.
iii, 10-15. It appears certain, however, that St. Paul is, in this
passage, thinking directly of the Last Day, the End of the
World, with its accompaniment of physical fire, and as to
how far the various human beings, then on earth, will be able
to endure the dread stress and testing of that crisis; and he
holds that some will be fit to bear it and some will not.
Such a destruction of the world by fire appears elsewhere in
Palestinian Jewish literature,-in the Book of Enoch and the
Testament of Levi; and in the New Testament, in 2 Peter
iii, 12: H The heavens being on fire shall be dissolved, and the
elements shall melt with fervent heat." Josephus, Antiquities,
XI, ii, 3, teaches a destruction by fire and another by water.
And the Stoics, to whom also Clement and Origen appeal,
had gradually modified their first doctrine of a simply cos-
mological Ekpyräsis, a renovation of the physical universe by
fire, into a moral purification of the earth, occasioned by, and
240 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
applied to, the sinfulness of man. Thus Seneca has the
double, water-and-fire, instrument: U At that time the tide I} of
the sea U will be borne along free from all measure, for the
same reason which will cause the future conflagration. Both
occur when it seems fit to God to initiate a better order of
things and to have done with the old. . . . The judgment of
mankind being concluded, the primitive order of things will
be recalled, and to the earth will be re-given man innocent
of crimes." 1
(2) It is interesting to note how-largely under the influence
of the forensic temper and growth of the Canonical Penitential
system, and of its successive relaxations in the fonn of sub-
stituted lighter good works, Indulgences,-the Latin half of
Christendom, ever more social and immediately practical than
the Greek portion, came, in general, more and more to dwell
upon two ideas suggested to their minds by those two, Gospel
and Pauline, passages. The one idea was that souls which,
whilst fundamentally well-disposed, are not fit for Heaven at
the body's death, can receive instant purification by the
momentary fire of the Particular Judgment; and the other
held that, thus already entirely purified and interiorly fit for
Heaven, they are but detained (in what we ought, properly, to
tenn a Satisfactoriu11t), to suffer the now completely non-
ameliorative, simply vindictive, infliction of punishment,-a
punishment still, in strict justice, due to them for past sins, of
which the guilt and the deteriorating effects upon their own
souls have been fully remitted and cured.
In this way it was felt that the complete unchangeableness
of the çondition of every kind of soul after death, or at least
after the Particular Judgment (a Judgment held practically
to synchronize with death), was assured. And indeed how
could there be any interior growth in Purgatory, seeing that
there is no meriting there? Again it was thought that thus
the vision of God at the moment of Judgment was given an
operative value for the spiritual amelioration of souls which,
already in substantially good dispositions, could hardly be
held to pass through so profound an experience without
intrinsic improvement, as the other view seemed to hold.-
And, above all, this form of the doctrine was found greatly to
favour the multiplication among the people of prayers, Masses
and good-works for the dead; since the 1nodus operandi of
1 N atur. quaest. III. 28. 7; 30. 7. 8.
AFTER-LIFE PROBLEMS AND DOCTRINES 24 1
such acts seemed thus to become entirely clear, simple,
immediate, and, as it were, measurable and mechanical. For
these souls in their" Satisfactorium," being, from its very
beginning, already completely purged and fit for Heaven,-
God is, as it were, free to relax at any instant, in favour of
sufficiently fervent or numerous intercessions, the exigencies
of his entirely extrinsic justice.
(3) The position of a purely extrinsic punishment is
emphasized, with even unusual vehemence, in the theological
glosses inserted, in about 1512 to 1529, in Catherine's
Dicchiaraz'Z.one. Yet it is probably the very influential Jesuit
theologian Francesco Suarez, who died in 1617, who has done
most towards formulating and theologically popularizing this
view. All the guilt of sin, he teaches, is remitted (in these
Middle souls) at the first moment of the soul's separation
from the body, by means of a single act of contrition, whereby
the will is wholly converted to God, and turned away from
every venial sin. "And in this way sin may be remitted, as
to its guilt, in Purgatory, because the soul's purification dates
from this moment" ;-in strictness, from before the first
moment of what should be here termed the H Satisfactorium."
As to bad habits and vicious inclinations, H we ought not to
imagine that the soul is detained for these" : but " they are
either taken away at the moment of death, or expelled by an
infusion of the contrary virtues when the soul enters into
glory." 1 This highly artificial, inorganic view is adopted,
amongst other of our contemporary theologians, by Atzberger,
the continuator of Scheeben. 2
6. The ]udaeo-Ro1nan conception must be taken in synthesis
w'ith the Alexandrine.
Now it is plain that the long-enduring Penitential system
of the Latin Church, and the doctrine and practice of Indul-
gences stand for certain important truths liable to being
insufficiently emphasized by the Greek teachings concerning
an intrinsically ameliorative Purgatorium, and that there can
be no question of simply eliminating these truths. But
neither are they capable of simple co-ordination with, still
less of super-ordination to, those most profound and spiritually
central immanental positions. As between the primarily
forensic and governmental, and the directly ethical and
spiritual, it will be the former that will have to be conceived
1 Disp. XI, Sec. iv, art. 2,
13, 10; Disp. XLVII. Sec. i, art. 6.
I Scheeben's Dogmatik. Vol. IV, 1903, pp. 856 (No. 93). 723.
VOL. II. R
,
242 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
and practised as, somehow, an expression and amplification
of, and a practical corrective and means to, the latter. 1
(I) The ordinary, indeed the strictly obligatory, Church teach-
ing clearly marks the suggested relation as the right one, at
three, simply cardinal points. We are bound, by the Confes-
sion of Faith of Michael Palaeologus, I267 A.D., and by the
Decree of the Council of Florence, I429 A.D., to hold that
these Middle souls (( are purged after death by purgatorial or
cathartic pains"; and by that of Trent U that there is a
Purgatory." 2 Yet we have here a true lucus a non lucendo, if
this place or state does not involve purgation: for no theologian
dares explicitly to transfer and restrict the name U Purgatory"
to the instant of the soul's Particular Judgment; even
Suarez, as we have seen, has to extend the name somehow.
Next we are bound, by the same three great Decrees, to
hold indeed that (( the Masses, Prayers, Alms, and other pious
offices of the Faithful Living are profitable towards the relief
of these pains," yet this by mode of U suffrage," since, as the
severely orthodox Jesuit, Father H. Hurter, explains in his
standard Theologiae Dog111aticae C o1npendiu1n, U the fruit of
this impetration and satisfaction is not infallible, for it depends
upon the merciful acceptance of God." 3 Hence in no case
can we, short of superstition, conceive such good works as
operating automatically: so that the a priori simplest view
concerning the mode of operation of these prayers is declared
to be mistaken. We can and ought, then, to choose among
the conceptions, not in proportion to their mechanical sim-
plicity, but according to their spiritual richness and to their
analogy with our deepest this-life experiences.
And we are all bound, by the Decree of Trent and the
Condemnation of Baius, I567 A.D., to hold that Contrition
springing from Perfect Love reconciles man with God, even
before Confession, and this also outside of cases of necessity or
of martyrdom:' Indeed, it is the common doctrine that one
single act of Pure Love abolishes, not only Hell, but Purgatory,
so that, if the soul were to die whilst that act was in operation,
1 See Abbé Boudhinon's careful article, .. Sur l'Histoire des Indul-
gences," Revue d' Histoire et de Littérature Religieuses, 1 8 9 8 , pp. 435-455,
for a vivid illustration of the necessity of explaining the details of this
doctrine and practice by history of the most patient kind.
,. Denzinger, Enchiridion, ed. 1888, Nos. 3 8 7, 5 88 , 859.
a Denzinger, ibid., Hurter, op. cit. ed. 1893, Vol. III, p. 591.
· Denzinger, ibid.. ed. 1888, Nos. 77 8 , 951.
AFTER-LIFE PROBLEMS AND DOCTRINES 243
it would forthwith be in Heaven. If then, in case of perfect
purity, the soul is at once in heaven, the soul cannot be quite
pure and yet continue in Purgatory.
(2) It is thus plain that, as regards Sin in its relation to the
Sinner, there are, in strictness, ever three points to consider:
the guilty act, the reflex effect of the act upon the disposition
of the agent, and the punishment; for all theologians admit
that the more or less bad disposition, contracted through the
sinful act, remains in the soul, except in the case of Perfect
Contrition, after the guilt of the act has been remitted. But
whilst the holders of an Extrinsic, Vindictive Purgatory, work
for a punishment as independent as possible of these moral
effects of sin still present in the pardoned soul, the advocates
of an Intrinsic, Ameliorative Purgatory find the punishment
to centre in the pain and difficulty attendant upon U getting
slowly back to fully virtuous dispositions, through retracing
the steps we have taken in departing from it." 1 And the
system of Indulgences appears, in this latter view, to find its
chief justification in that it keeps up a link with the past
Penitential system of the Church; that it vividly recalls
and applies the profound truth of the interaction, for good
even more than for evil, between all human souls, alive and
dead; and that it insists upon the readily forgotten truth of
even the forgiven sinner, the man with the good determination,
having ordinarily still much to do and to suffer before he is
quit of the effects of his sin.
(3) And the difficulties and motives special to those who
supplant the Intrinsic, Ameliorating Purgatory by an Extrinsic,
Vindicative Satísfactoríu1n, can indeed be met by those who
would preserve that beautifully dynamic, ethical, and spiritual
conception. For we can hold that the fundamental condi-
tion,-the particular determination of theactivewill,-remains
quite unchanged, from Death to Heaven, in these souls; that
this determination of the active will requires more or less of
time and suffering fully to permeate and assimilate to itself
all the semi-voluntary wishes and habits of the soul; and
that this permeation takes place among conditions in which
the soul's acts are too little resisted and too certain of suc-
cess to be constituted meritorious. We can take Catherine's
beautiful Plunge-conception as indicating the kind of opera-
tion effected in and by the soul, at and through the momentary
vision of God. And we can feel convinced that it is ever, in
1 Cardinal Manning in Treatise. ed. cit. p. 31.
..
244 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
the long run, profoundly dangerous to try to clarify and simplify
doctrines beyond or against the scope and direction of the
analogies of Nature and of Grace, which are ever so dynamic
and organic in type: for the poor and simple, as truly as the
rich and learned, ever require, not to be merely taken and left
as they are, but to be raised and trained to the most adequate
conceptions possible to each.-It is, in any case, very certain
that the marked and widespread movement of return to belief
in a Middle State is distinctly towards a truly Purgative Pur-
gatory, although few of these sincere truth-seekers are aware,
as is Dr. Anrich, that they are groping after a doctrine all
but quite explained away by a large body of late Scholastic
and Neo-Scholastic theologians. 1
(4) Yet it is very satisfactory to note how numerous, and
especially how important are, after all is said, the theologians
who have continued to walk, in this matter, in the footsteps
of the great Alexandrines. St. Gregory of Nyssa teaches a
healing of the soul in the beyond and a purification by fire. 2
St. Augustine says that (( fire bums up the work of him who
thinketh of the things of this world, since possessions, that
are loved, do not perish without pain on the part of their
possessor. It is not incredible that something of this sort
takes place after this Hfe." 3
St. Thomas declares most plainly: II Venial guilt, in a soul
which dies in a state of grace, is remitted after this life by
the purging fire, because that pain, which is in some manner
accepted by the will, has, in virtue of grace, the power of
expiating all such guilt as can co-exist with a state of grace."
(( After this life . . . there can be merit with respect to some
accident a] reward, so long as a man remains in some manner
in a state of probation: and hence there can be meritorious
acts in Purgatory, with respect to the remission of venial
sin." '-Dante (d. I32I) also appears, as Father Faber finely
notes, to hold such a voluntary, immanental Purgatory, where
the poet sees an Angel impelling, across the sea at dawn,
a bark filled with souls bent for Purgatory: for the boat is
described as driving towards the shore so lightly as to draw
no wake upon the water. 5
1 Gp. cit. pp. 119, 120: "The Purgatory of the Catholic Church, in
strictness, bears its name without warrant,"
t Cat.. cc. viii, 35. I De octo Dulcitii quaest. 12. 13.
" Summa Theol.. app., quo 2, art. 4. in corp. et ad 4.
6 Divina Commedia, Purg. II. 40-42. See Faber. All for J
sus. ed.
1 88 9, p. 361.
AFTER-LIFE PROBLEMS AND DOCTRINES 245
Cardinal Bellarmine, perhaps the greatest of all anti-
Protestant theologians (d. 1621) teaches that II venial sin is
remitted in Purgatory quoad culþal1t," and that II this guilt,
as St. Thomas rightly insists, is remitted in Purgatory by
an act of love and patient endurance." 1 St. Francis of
Sales, that high ascetical authority (d. 1622), declares: U By
Purgatory we understand a place where souls undergo pur-
gation, for a while, from the stains and imperfections which
they have carried away with them from this mortal life." 2
And recently and in England we have had Father Faber,
Cardinal Manning, and Cardinal Newman, although differing
from each other on many other points, fully united in holding
and propagating this finely life-like, purgative conception of
Purgatory.3
7. A final difficulty.
One final point concerning a Middle State. In the Synoptic
tradition there is a recurrent insistence upon the forgiveness
of particular sins, at particular moments, by particular human
and divine acts of contrition and pardon. In the Purgatorial
teaching the stress lies upon entire states and habits, stains
and perversities of soul, and upon God's general grace work-
ing, in and through immanently necessary, freely accepted
sufferings, on to a slow purification of the complete personality.
As Origen says: U The soul's single acts, good or bad, go by;
but, according to their quality, they give form and tìgure to
the mind of the agent, and leave it either good or bad, and
destined for pains or for rewards." 4
The antagonism here is but apparent. For the fact that
a certain condition of soul precedes, and that another con-
dition succeeds, each act of the same soul, in proportion as
this act is full and deliberate, does not prevent the correspond-
ing, complementary fact that such acts take the preceding
condition as their occasion, and make the succeeding con-
dition into a further expression of themselves. Single acts
which fully express the character, whether good or bad, are
doubtless rarer than is mostly thought. Yet Catherine, in
union with the Gospels and the Church, is deeply convinced
1 De Purgatorio, Lib. I, c. iv, 6; c. xiv, 22.
2 Les Controverses, Pt. III, ch. ii, art. 1 (end); CEuvres, Annccy, 1892
seq., Vol. I, p. 365.
3 Faber's All for Jesus, 1853, ch. ix, sec. 4: Cardinal Manning's
Appendix (B) to Engl. tr. of St. Catherine's Treatise on Pur8atory. 18 5 8 ;
Cardinal Newman's Dream of Gerontius, 1865. .
" In Rom.. Tom. i, p. 477.
24 6 THE l\fYSTICAL ELEMENT O:F' RELIGION
of the power of one single act of Pure Love to abolish, not of
course the effects outward, but the reflex spiritual consequences
upon the soul itself, of sinful acts or states.
Catherine's picture again, of the deliberate Plunge into
Purgatory, gives us a similar heroic act which, summing up
the whole soul's active volitions, initiates and encloses the
whole subsequent purification, but which itself involves a
prevenient act of Divine Love and mercy, to which this act
of human love is but the return and response. Indeed, as \ve
know, this plunge-conception was but the direct projection, on
to the other-world-picture, of her own personal experience at
her conversion, when a short span of clock-time held acts
of love received and acts of love returned, which transformed
all her previous condition, and initiated a whole series of states
ever more expressive of her truest self.-Act and state and
state and act, each presupposes and requires the other:
and both are present in the Synoptic pictures, and both are
opera ti ve in the Purgatorial teaching; although in the former
the accounts are so brief as to make states and acts alike look
as though one single act; and, in the latter, the descriptions
are so large as to make the single acts almost disappear behind
the states.
v. CATHERINE AND HEAVEN-THREE PERPLEXITIES TO
BE CONSIDERED.
We have found a truly Purgational Middle state, with its
sense of succession, its mixture of joy and suffering, and
its growth and fruitfulness, to be profoundly consonant with
all our deepest spiritual experiences and requirements. But
what about Heaven, which we must, apparently, hold to
consist of a sense of simultaneity, a condition of mere repro-
ductiveness and utterly uneventful finality, and a state of
unmixed, unchanging joy?-Here again, even if in a lesser
degree, certain experiences of the human soul can help us
to a few general positions of great spiritual fruitfulness,
which can reasonably claim an analogical applicability to
the Beyond, and which, thus taken as our ultimate ideals,
cannot fail to stimulate the growth of our personality, and,
with it, of further insight into these great realities. I shall
here consider three main questions, which will roughly
correspond to the three perplexities just indicated;
AFTER-LIFE PROBLEMS AND DOCTRINES 247
I. Time and Heaven.
Our first question, then, is as to the probable character of
man's happiest ultimate consciousness,-whether it is one
of succession or of simultaneity: in other words, whether,
besides the disappearance of the category of space (a point
already discussed), there is likely to be the lapse of the
category of time also.-And let it be noted that the reten-
tion of the latter sense for Hell, and even for Purgatory, does
not prejudge the question as to its presence or absence in
Heaven, since those two states are admittedly non-normative,
whereas the latter represents the very ideal and measure of
man's full destination and perfection.
(I) Now it is still usual, amongst those who abandon the
ultimacy of the space-category, simultaneously to drop, as
necessarily concomitant, the time-category also. Tennyson,
among the poets, does so, in his beautiful U Crossing the Bar" :
U From out our bourne of Time and Place, the flood may
bear me far"; and Prof. H. J. Holtzmann, among speculative
theologians, in criticising Rothe's conception of man as a
quite ultimately spatial-temporal being, treats these two
questions as standing and falling together .1_ Y et a careful
study of Kant's critique of the two categories of Space and
Time suffices to convince us of the indefinitely richer con-
tent, and more ultimate reality, of the latter. Indeed, I shall
attempt to show more fully in the next chapter, with the
aid of M. Henri Bergson, that mathematical, uniform clock-
time is indeed an artificial compound, which is made up of
our profound experience of a duration in which the con-
stituents (sensations, imaginations, thoughts, feelings, willings)
of the succession ever, in varying degrees, overlap, inter-
penetrate, and modify each other, and the quite automatic
and necessary simplification and misrepresentation of this
experience by its imaginary projection on to space,-its
restatement, by our picturing faculty, as a perfectly equable
succession of mutally exclusive moments. It is in that
interpenetrative duration, not in this atomistic clock-time,
that our deeper human experiences take place.
(2) But that sense of duration, is it indeed our deepest
apprehension? Dr. Holtzmann points out finely how that
we are well aware, in our profoundest experiences, of U that
permanently incomprehensible fact,-the existence of, as it
1 Richard Rothe's Spekulatives System, 1899, pp. 123, 124.
.
24 8 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
were, a prism, through which the unitary ray of light, which
fills our consciousness with a real content, is spread out into
a colour-spectrum, so that what, in itself, exists in pure
unitedness" and simultaneity, U becomes intelligible to us
only as a juxtaposition in space and a succession in time.
Beyond the prism, there are no such two things." And he
shows how keenly conscious we are, at times, of that deepest
mode of apprehension and of being which is a Simultaneity,
an eternal Here and Now; and how ruinous to our spiritual
life would be a full triumph of the category of time. 1
But it is St. Augustine who has, so far, found the noblest
expression for the deepest human experiences in this whole
matter of Duration and Simultaneity, as against mere Clock-
Time, although, here as with regard to Space, he is deeply
indebted to Plotinus. U In thee, 0 my soul, I measure time,-
I measure the impression which passing events make upon
thee, who remain est when those events have passed: this
present impression then, and not those events which had to
pass in order to produce it, do I measure, when I measure time."
U The three times," tenses, U past, present, and future. . . are
certain three affections in the soul, I find them there and
nowhere else. There is the present memory of past events,
the present perception of present ones, and the present
expectation of future ones." God possesses U the splendour
of ever-tarrying Eternity," which is " incomparable with never-
tarrying times," since in it U nothing passes, but the content
of everything abides simply present." And in the next life
U perhaps our own thoughts also will not be flowing, going
from one thing to another, but we shan see all we know
simultaneously, in one intuition." St. Thomas indeed is more
positive: "All things will," in Heaven, U be seen simultaneously
and not successively." 2
(3) If then, even here below, we can so clearly demonstrate
the conventionality of mere Clock-Time, and can even conceive
a perfect Simultaneity as the sole form of the consciousness
of God, we cannot well avoid holding that, in the other life,
the clock-time convention will completely cease, and that,
though the sense of Duration is not likely completely to dis-
appear (since, in this life at least, this sense is certainly not
1 Richard Rothe's Spekulatives System, 1899, pp. 69; 74, 75.
2 St. Augustine, Confessions. Lib. XI, ch. xxvii, 3; ch. xx; ch. xi. Dø
T,.init., Lib. XV. ch. 16, ed. Ben., co!. 1492 D.-5t. Thomas. Summa
Theol., I, quo 12. art. 10. in corp.
AFTER-LIFE PROBLEMS AND DOCTRINES 249
merely phenomenal for man, and its entire absence would
apparently make man into God), the category of Simultaneity
win, as a sort of strong background-consciousness, englobe
and profoundly unify the sense of Duration. And, the more
God-like the soul, the more would this sense of Simultaneity
predon1inate over the sense of Duration.
2. The Ultitnate Good, concrete, not abstract.
Our second question concerns the kind and degree of
variety in unity which we should conceive to characterize
the life of God, and of the soul in its God-likeness. Is this
type and measure of all life to be conceived as a maximum
of abstraction or as a maximum of concretion; as pure
thought alone, or as also emotion and will; as solitary and
self-centred, or as social and outgoing; and as simply
reproductive, or also as operative?
(r) Now it is certain that nothing is easier, and nothing
has been more common, than to take the limitations of our
earthly conditions, and especially those attendant upon the
strictly contemplative, and, still more, those connected with
the technically ecstatic states, as so many advantages, or even
as furnishing a complete scheme of the soul's ultimate life.
As we have already repeatedly seen in less final matters, so
here once more, at the end, we can trace the sad impoverish-
ment to the spiritual outlook produced by the esteem in which
the antique world generally held the psycho-physical peculi-
arities of trances, as directly valuable or even as prophetic
of the soul's ultimate condition; the contraposition and
exaltation, already on the part of Plato and Aristotle, of a
supposed non-actively contemplative, above a supposed non-
contemplatively active life; the largely excessive, not fully
Christianizable, doctrines of the N eo- Platonists as to the
Negative, Abstractive way, when taken as self-sufficient, and
as to Quiet, Passivity, and Emptiness of Soul, when under-
stood literally; and the conception, rarely far away from the
ancient thinkers, of the soul as a substance which, full-grown,
fixed and stainless at the first, requires but to be kept free
from stain up to the end.
And yet the diminution of vitality in the trance, and even
the inattention to more than one thing at a time in Con-
templation, are, in themselves, defects, at best the price paid
for certain gains; the active and the contemplative life are,
ultimately, but two mutually complementary sides of life. so
that no life ever quite succeeds in eliminating either element,
25 0 THE
IYSTIGAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
and life, caeteris paribus, is complete and perfect, in proportion
as it embraces both elements, each at its fullest, and the two
in a perfect interaction; the Negative, Abstractive way
peremptorily requires also the other, the Affirmative, Concrete
way; the Quiet, Passivity, Emptiness are really, when whole-
some, an incubation for, or a rest from, Action, indeed they
are themselves a profound action and peace, and the soul is
primarily a Force and an Energy, and Holiness is a growth
of that Energy in Love, in ful] Being, and in creative, spiritual
Personality.
(2) Now on this whole matter the European Christian
1\1 ystics, strongly influenced by, yet also largely developing,
certain doctrines of the Greeks, have, I think, made two most
profound contributions to the truths of the spirit, and have
seriously fallen short of reality in three respects.
The first contribution can, indeed, be credited to Aristotle,
whose luminous formulations concerning Energeia, Action (as
excluding 1\iotion, or Activity), we have already referred to.
Here to be is to act, and Energeia, a being's perfect function-
ing and fullest self-expression in action, is not some kind of
movement or process; but, on the contrary, all movement and
process is only an imperfect kind of Energeia. Man, in his life
here, only catches brief glimpses of such an Action; but God
is not so hampered,-He is ever completely all that He can
be, His Action is kept up inexhaustibly and ever generates
supreme bliss; it is an unchanging, unmoving Energeia. 1
-And St. Thomas echoes this great doctrine, for all the
Christian schoolmen: (( A thing is declared to be perfect,
in proportion as it is in act," -as all its potentialities are
expressed in action; and hence (( the First Principle must
be supremely in act," (( God's Actuality is identical with His
Potentiality," (( God is Pure Action (Actus Purus)." 2_ Y et it
is doubtless the Christian Mystics who have most fully
experienced, and emotionally vivified, this great truth, and
who cease not, in all their more characteristic teachings, from
insisting upon the ever-increasing acquisition of (( Action,"
the fully fruitful, peaceful functioning of the whole soul, at
the expense of (( activity," the restless, sterile distraction and
1 I am here but giving an abstract of Mr. F. C. S. Schiller's admirable
essay, .. Activity and Substance," pp. 204-227 of his Humanism, 1903.
where all the Aristotelian passages are carefully quoted and discussed.
He is surely right in translating -1]PEP.(a. by "constancy:' not by "rest."
J Summa Theol., I, quo 4, art. I. cone!. quo 25, art. I ad 2 et cone!.
AFTER-LIFE PROBLEMS AND DOCTRINES 25I
internecine conflict of its powers. And Heaven, for them, ever
consists in an unbroken Action, devoid of all H activity," ren-
dering the soul, in its degree, like to that Purest Action, God,
who, Himself l( Life," is, as our Lord declared, (( not the God
of the dead, but of the living." 1
And the second contribution can, in part, be traced back to
Plato, who does not weary, in the great middle period of his
writings, from insisting upon the greatness of the nobler
passions, and who already apprehends a Heavenly Eros
which in part conflicts with, in part transcends, the Earthly
one. But here especially it is Christianity, and in particular
Christian Mysticism, which have fully experienced and pro-
claimed that H God" is (( Love," and that the greatest of all
the soul's acts and virtues is Charity, Pure Love. And hence
the Pure Act of God, and the Action of the God-like soul, are
conceived not, Aristotle-like, as acts of pure intelligence alone,
but as tinged through and through with a noble emotion.
(3) But in three matters the Mystics, as such and as a
whole, have, here especially under the predominant influence
of Greek thought, remained inadequate to the great spiritual
realities, as most fully revealed to us by Christianity. The
three points are so closely interconnected that it will be best
first to illustrate, and then to criticise them, together.
(i) Aristotle here introduces the mischief. For it is he who
in his great, simply immeasurably influential, theological
tractate, Chapters VI to X of the Twelfth Book of his M eta-
Physic, has presented to us God as U the one first unmoved
Mover" of the Universe, but Who moves it as desired by it,
not as desiring it, as outside of it, not as also inside it. God
here is sheer Pure Thought, N oësis, for (( contemplation is the
most joyful and the best" of actions. And (( Thought" here
(( thinks the divinest and worthiest, without change," hence
tt It thinks Itself, and the Thinking is a Thinking of
Thought." 2 We have here, as Dr. Caird strikingly puts
it, a God necessarily shut up within Himself, (( of purer eyes
than to behold, not only iniquity but even contingency and
finitude, and His whole activity is one act of pure self-
contemplation." (t The ideal activity which connects God with
the world, appears thus as in the world and not in God." 3
1 Matt. xxii. 32. 2 MetaPhysic. xii. 1072b. I074 b .
a E. Caird. Evolution of Theology in the Greek PhilosoPhers. 19 0 4.
Vol. II. pp. 12. 16. See here. too. the fine discussion of the other. rightly
immanental as well as transcendental. teaching of Aristotle. pp. 15. 21.
252 THE MYSTIOAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
(ii) Now we have already allowed that the l\lystics avoid
Aristotle's elimination of emotion from man's deepest action,
and of emotion's equivalent from the life of God. But they
are, for the most part, much influenced in their speculations
by this intensely Greek, aristocratic, intellectualist conception,
in the three points of a disdain of the Contingent and His-
torical; of a superiority to volitional, productive energizing;
and of a presentation of God as unsocial, and as occupied
directly with Himself alone. We have already studied
numerous examples of the first two, deeply un-Christian, errors
as they ha ve more or less influenced Christian
I ysticism ;
the third mistake, of a purely Transcendental, Deistic God, is
indeed never consistently maintained by any Christian, and
Catherine, in particular, is ever dominated by the contrary
great doctrine, adumbrated by Plato and fully revealed by
Our Lord, of the impulse to give Itself intrinsic to Goodness,
so that God, as Supreme Goodness, becomes the Supreme
Self-giver, and thus the direct example and motive for our
own self-donation to Him. Yet even so deeply religious a
non-Christian as Plotinus, and such speculative thinkers as
Eriugena and Eckhart (who certainly intended to remain
Christians) continue all three mistakes, and especially insist
upon a Supreme Being, Whose true centre, His Godhead, is
out of all relation to anything but Himself. And even the
orthodox Scholastics, and St. Thomas himself, attempt at
times to combine, with the noblest Platonic and the deepest
Christian teachings, certain elements, which, in strictness,
have no place in an Incamational Religion.
(iii) For, at times, the fullest, deepest Action is still not
conceived, even by St. Thomas, as a Harmony, an Organiza-
tion of all Man's essential powers, the more the better. (( In
the active life, which is occupied with many things, there is
less of beatitude than in the contemplative life, which is busy
with one thing alone,-the contemplation of Truth"; (( beati-
tude must consist essentially in the action of the intellect;
and only accidentally in the action of the will." 1 God is still
primarily intelligence: (( God's intelligence is His substance" ;
whereas (t volition must be in God, since there is intelligence
in Him," and (( Love must of necessity be declared to be in God,
since there is volition in Him." 2 God is still, in a certain sense,
shut up in Himself: (( As He understands things other than
1 Summa Theol., I, ii, quo 3, art. 2 ad 4; art. 4, conc!.
2 Ibid.. I, quo 14. art. 4, in corp.; quo 19, art. I. cond.; quo 20. art. I. condo
AFTER-LIFE PROBLEMS AND DOCTRINES 253
Himself, by understanding His own essence, so He wills things
other than Himself, by willing His own goodness." (( God en-
joys not anything beside Himself, but enjoys Himself alone." 1
-And we get, in correspondence to this absorption of God in
Himself, an absorption of man in God, of so direct and
exclusive a kind, as, if pressed, to eliminate all serious, perma-
nent value, for our soul, in God's actual creation of our fellow-
creatures. (( He who knoweth Thee and creatures, is not, on
this account, happier than if he knows them not; but he is
happy because of Thee alone." And (( the perfection of Love
is essential to beatitude, with respect to the Love of God, not
with respect to the Love of one's neighbour. If there were but
one soul alone to enjoy God, it would be blessèd, even though
it were without a single fellow-creature whom it could love." 2
(iv) And yet St. Thomas's own deeply Christian sense,
explicit sayings of Our Lord or of St. Paul, and even, in part,
certain of the fuller apprehensions of the Greeks, can make
the great Dominican again uncertain, or can bring him to
entirely satisfactory declarations, on each of these points.
For we get the declaration that direct knowledge of individual
things, and quasi-creative operativeness are essential to all
true perfection. (( To understand something merely in general
and not in particular, is to know it imperfectly"; Our Lord
Himself has taught us that II the very hairs of your head are
all numbered"; hence God must (( know all other individual
things with a distinct and proper knowledge."-And II a thing
is most perfect, when it can make another like unto itself.
But by tending to its own perfection, each thing tends to
become more and more like God. Hence everything tends
to be like God, in so far as it tends to be the cause of other
things." 3-We get a full insistence, with St. Paul (in I Cor. xiii),
upon our love of God, an act of the will, as nobler than our
cognition of Him; and with Plato and St. John, upon God's
forthgoing Love for His creatures, as the very crown and meas-
ure of His perfection. I I Everything in nature has, as regards its
own good, a certain inclination to diffuse itself amongst others,
as far as possible. And this applies, in a supreme degree, to
the Divine Goodness, from which all perfection is derived."
1 Summa Theol.. I. quo 9, art. 2. 3; quo 14, art. 2 ad 2; I. ii. quo 3.
art. 2 ad 4.
I Ibid.. I, quo 12, art. 8 ad 4; I, ii, quo 4, art. 8 ad 3.
8 Ibid.. I. quo 14, art. 8. in corp.; art. 1 I. contra et conc!.; art 8. concl.-
Contra Gent.. Lib. III. c. xxi. in fine.
254 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
" Love, Joy, Delight can be predicated of God"; Love which,
of its very essence, (( causes the lover to bear himself to the
beloved as to his own self": so that we must say with
Dionysius that (( He, the very Cause of all things, becomes
ecstatic, moves out of Himself, by the abundance of His
loving goodness, in the providence exercised by Him to\vards
all things extant." 1
(v) And we get in St. Thomas, when he is too much domin-
ated by the abstractive trend, a most interesting, because
logically necessitated and quite unconscious, collision with
certain sayings of Our Lord. For he then explains Matt.
xviii, 10, " their," the children's, (( Angels see without ceasing
the face of their Father who is in Heaven" as teaching that
(( the action (operatio), by which Angels are conjoined to the
increate Good, is, in them, unique and sempitemal "; whereas
his commentators are driven to admit that the text, contrari-
wise, implies that these Angels have two simultaneous
(( operations," and that their succouring action in nowise
disturbs their intellectual contemplation. Hence, even if we
press Matt. xxii, 30, that we " shall be as the Angels of God,"
we still have an organism of peaceful Action, composed of
intellectual, affective, volitional, productive acts operating
between the soul and God, and the soul and other souls,
each constituent and object working and attained in and
through all the others.
(vi) Indeed all Our Lord's Synoptic teachings, as to man's
ultimate standard and destiny, belong to this God-in -man
and man-in-God type of doctrine: for there the two great
commandments are strictly inseparable; God's interest in
the world is direct and detailed,-it is part of His supreme
greatness that He cares for every sparrow that falls to the
ground; and man, in the Kingdom of God, will sit down at a
banquet, the unmistakable type of social joys.-And even
the Apocalypse, which has, upon the whole, helped on so
much the conception of an exclusive, unproductive entrance-
ment of each soul singly in God alone, shows the deepest
emotion when picturing all the souls, from countless tribes
and nations, standing before the throne,-an emotion which
can, surely, not be taken as foreign to those souls themselves. 2
1 Su.mma Theol., II, ii, quo 3, art. 4, 4; I, quo 19, art. 2. in corp.; quo
20, art. I ad I; ad 3; art. 2 ad I.
2 Mark xii, 28-34 and parallels; Matt. x. 29; Luke xii, 6; Matt. xxv.
10; Mark xiv. 25 and parallels. and elsewhere; Apoc. vii, 9.
AFTER-LIFE PROBLEMS AND DOCTRINES 255
But, indeed, Our Lord's whole life and message become
unintelligible, and the Church loses its deepest roots, unless
the Kingdom of God is, for us human souls, as truly a part
of our ultimate destiny as is God Himself, that God who fully
reveals to us His own deepest nature as the Good Shepherd,
the lover of each single sheep and of the flock as a whole. 1
(4) We shall, then, do well to hold that the soul's ultimate
beatitude will consist in its own greatest possible self-
realization in its God-likeness,-an Action free from all
Activity, but full of a knowing, feeling, willing, receiving,
giving, effectuating, all which will energize between God and
the soul, and the soul and other souls, -each force and
element functioning in its proper place, but each stimulated
to its fullest expansion, and hence to its deepest delight, by
the corresponding vitalization of the other powers and ends,
and of other similar centres of rich action.
3. The þain-ele1nent of Bliss.
And our third, last question is whether our deepest this-life
apprehensions and experiences give us any reason for hold-
ing that a certain equivalent for what is noblest in devoted
suffering, heroic self-oblivion, patient persistence in lonely
willing, will be present in the life of the Blessed. It would
certainly be a gain could we discover such an equivalent, for
a pure glut of happiness, an unbroken state of sheer enjoy-
ment, can as little be made attractive to our most spiritual
requirements, as the ideal of an action containing an element
of, or equivalent for, devoted and fruitful effort and renuncia-
tion can lose its perennial fascination for what is most Christian
within us.
(r) It is not difficult, I take it, to find suchan element, which
we cannot think away from any future condition of the soul
without making that soul into God Himself. The ultimate
cause of this element shall be considered, as Personality, in
our next chapter: here I can but indicate this element at
work in our relations to our fellow-men and to God.-Already
St. Thomas, throughout one current of his teaching, is full
of the dignity of right individuality. U The l\rlultitude and
Di versity of natures in the U ni verse proceed directly from
the intention of God, who brought them into being, in order to
communicate His goodness to them, and to have It represented
by them. And since It could not be sufficiently represented
1 Matt. xviü. 12-14; Luke xv. 1-10; John x. 11-16 (Ezekiel xxxiv.
12- 1 9).
256 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
by one creature alone, He produced many and diverse ones,
so that what is wanting to the one towards this office, should
be supplied by the other." 1 Hence the multiplication of the
Angels, who differ specifically each from all the rest, adds
more of nobility and perfection to the Universe, than does
the multiplication of men, who differ only individually. 2 And
Cardinal Nicolas of Coes writes, in 1457 A.D., (( Every man is,
as it were, a separate species, because of his perfectibility." 3
As Prof. Josiah Royce tells us in 1901, (( What is real, is
not only a content of experience and the embodiment of a
type; but an individual content of experience, and the unique
embodiment of a type." 4.
(2) Now in the future beatitude, where the full develop-
ment of this uniqueness in personality cannot, as so often
here, be stunted or misapplied, all this will evidently reach its
zenith. But, if so, then it fonows that, aahough one of the two
greatest of the joys of those souls will be their love and under-
standing of each other,-this love and trust, given as it will be
to the other sollis, in their full, unique personality, will, of neces-
sity, exceed the comprehension of the giving personalities.
Hence there will still be an equivalent for that trust and ven-
ture, that creative faith in the love and devotion given by us
to our fellows, and found by us in them, which are, here below,
the noblest concomitants and conditions of the pain and the
cost and the joy in every virile love and self-dedication.-
There is then an element of truth in Lessing's words of 1773 :
(( The human soul is incapable of even one unmixed emotion,-
one that, down to its minutest constituent, would be nothing
but pleasurable or nothing but painful: let alone of a con-
dition in which it would experience nothing but such
unmixed emotions."-For, as Prof. Troeltsch says finely in
19 0 3, (( Everything historical retains, in spite of all its relation to
absolute values, something of irrationality," -of impenetrable-
ness to finite minds, (( and of individuality. Indeed just this
mixture is the special characteristic of the lot and dignity of
man; nor is a Beyond for him conceivable in which it would
altogether cease. Doubt and unrest can indeed give way to
clear sight and certitude: yet this very clarity and assurance
1 Summa Theol.. I. quo 47. art. I. in corp.
· Ibid.. I. quo 50. art. 4 ad 3; ad 2; in corp. Contra Gent.. Lib. II,
c. xciii.
I Excitationum, Lib. VIII. 60 4.
, The JVorld and the Individual, Vol. II, p. 430.
AFTER-LIFE PROBLEMS AND DOCTRINES 257
will, in each human soul, still bear a certain individual
character," fully conlprehensible to the other souls by love
and trust alone.!
(3) And this same element we find, of course, in a still
greater degree,-although, as I shall argue later on, our ex-
perimental knowledge of God is greater than is our knowledge
of our fellow-creatures,-in the relations between our love of
God and our knowledge of Him. St. Thomas tells us most
solidly: "Individual Being applies to God, in so far as it
implies Incommunicableness." Indeed," Person signifies the
most perfect thing in nature,"-" the subsistence of an indi-
vidual in a rational nature." It And since the dignity of the
divine nature exceeds every other dignity, this name of Per-
son is applicable, in a supreme degree, to God." And again:
(( God, as infinite, cannot be held infinitely by anything finite II ;
and hence (( only in thesensein which comprehension is opposed
to a seeking after Him, is God comprehended, i.e. possessed, by
the Blessed. II And hence the texts: (( I press on, if so be
that I may apprehend that for which also I was apprehended II
(Phil. iii, 12) ; (( then shall I know even as also I have been
known II (I Cor. xiii, 12) ; and (( we shall see Him as He is " (I
John iii, 2) : all refer to such a possession of God. In the last
text (( the adverb ( as ' only signifies ( we shall see His essence'
and not ( we shall have as perfect a mode of vision as God has
a mode of being.' "2-Here again, then, we find that souls
loving God in His Infinite Individuality, will necessarily love
Him beyond their intellectual comprehension of Him; the
element of devoted trust, of free self-donation to One fully
known only through and in such an act, will thus remain to man
for ever. St. John of the Cross proclaimed this great truth:
(( One of the greatest favours of God, bestowed transiently
upon the soul in this life, is its ability to see so distinctly, and
to feel so profoundly, that . . . it cannot comprehend Him
at all. These souls are herein, in some degree, like to the
souls in heaven, where they who know Him most perfectly
perceive most clearly that He is infinitely incomprehensible;
for those that have the less clear vision, do not perceive so
distinctly as the others how greatly He transcends their
1 G. E. Lessing: Leibniz von den Ewigen Strafen, Werke, ed. Lach-
mann-Muncker, Vol. XI. 1895, p. 482. E. Troeltsch, Theologische RUl1d-
schau. 18 93. p. 72.
2 Summa Theol., I, art. 7, in corp.; art. 6 ad I.
VOL. II. S
..
258 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
vision." 1 With this teaching, so consonant with Catherine's
experimental method, and her continuous trust in the per-
sistence of the deepest relations of the soul to God, of the
self-identical soul to the unchanging God, we can conclude
this study of her Eschatology.
1 " A Spiritual Canticle." stanza vii. 10. in W Qrks. trans!. by D. Lewis.
ed. 1891. pp. 206. 207.
GHAPTER XIII
THE FIRST THREE ULTIMATE QUESTIONS. THE RELATIONS
BETWEEN MORALITY, MYSTICISM, PHILOSOPHY, AND
RELIGION. MYSTICISM AND THE LIMITS OF HUMAN
EXPERIENCE AND KNOWLEDGE. MYSTICISM AND THE
NATURE OF EVIL.
I TAKE the ultimate questions involved in the religious
positions which are taken up by Catherine, and indeed by the
Christian Mystics generally, and which we have studied in the
preceding two chapters, to be four. In the order of their
increasing difficulty they are: the question as to the relations
between Morality, Mysticism, Philosophy, and Religion; that
as to the Lin1its of Human Knowledge, and as to the special
character and worth of the Mystics' claim to Trans-subjective
Cognition; that as to the Nature of Evil and the Goodness or
Badness of Human Nature; and that as to Personality,-the
character of, and the relations between, the human spirit and
the Divine Spirit. The consideration of these deepest matters
in the next two chapters will, I hope, in spite of its inevitable
element of dimness and of repetition, do much towards binding
together and clarifying the convictions which we have been
slowly acquiring,-ever, in part, with a reference to these
coming ultimate alternatives and choices.
I. THE RELATIONS BETWEEN MORALITY -AND MYSTICISM,
PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION.
Now the first of these questions has not, for most of the
more strenuous of our educated contemporaries, become, so
far again, a living question at all. A morally good and pure,
a socially useful and active life,-all this in the sense and with
the range attributed to these terms by ordinary parlance: this
and this alone is, for doubtless the predominant public present-
day consciousness, the true object, end, and measure of all
259
260 THE MYSTICAL ELE
lENT OF RELIGION
healthy religion; whatever is alongside of, or beyond, or other
than, or anything but a direct and exclusive incentive to this,
is so much superstition and fanaticism. According to this
view, at least one-half of Catherine's activity at all times, and
well-nigh the whole of it during her last period, would be
practically worthless. Thus only certain elements of such a
life would be retained even for and in religion, and even these
would be bereft of all that has hitherto been held to be their
specifically religious sense and setting.
I. Kant's non-1nystical religion.
It is doubtless Kant who, among the philosophers, has
been the most consistent and influential in inculcating such
non-Mystical Religion. H Religion," he says in I793, H is, on
its subjective side, the cognition of all our duties as so many
Divine Commandments." "The delusion that we can effect
something, in view of our justification before God, by means
of acts of religious worship, is religious superstition; and the
delusion that we can effect something by attempts at a sup-
posed intercourse with God, is religious fanaticism. . . . Such
a feeling of the immediate presence of the Supreme Being,
and such a discrimination between this feeling and every
other, even moral, feeling, would imply a capacity for an
intuition, which i
without any corresponding organ in human
nature. . . . If then a Church doctrine is to abolish or to
prevent all religious delusion, it must,-over and above its
statutory teachings, with which it cannot, for the present,
entirelydispense,-contain within itself a principle which shall
enable it to bring about the religion of a pure life, as the true
end of the whole movement, and then to dispense with those
temporary doctrines." 1
It is deeply instructive to note how thoroughly this, at first
sight, solid and triumphant view, has not only continued to
be refuted by the actual practice and experience of specifically
religious souls, but how explicitly it is being discredited by
precisely the more delicately perceptive, the more truly
detached and comprehensive, students and philosophers of
religion of the present day ,-heirs, let us not forget in justice
to Kant, of the intervening profound development of the
historical sense, and of the history and psychology of re-
ligion.-Thus that most vigorous, independent thinker, Prof.
Simmel of Berlin, writes in I9 0 4 : Ie Kant has, I think, simply
1 Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der blossþJJ Vernunft. Werke, ed.
Hartenstein. 1868, Vol. VI, pp. 252. 274.
MORALITY, MYSTICISM, AND RELIGION 261
passed by the essentials of religion,-that is to say, of that
reality which historically bears the name of religion. Only
the reflection, that the harmony of complete happiness with
complete morality is producible by a Divine Being alone, is
here supposed to lead us to believe in such a Being. There
is here a complete absence of that direct laying hold of the
Divine by our souls, because of our intrinsic needs, which
characterizes all genuine piety. And the religious sense is
not recognized as an organism with a unity of its own, as a
growth springing from its own root. The entirely specific
character of religion, which is resolvable neither into morality
nor into a thirst after happiness: the direct self-surrender of the
soul to a higher reality, the giving and taking, the unification
and differentiation,-that quite organic unity of the religious
experience, which we can but most imperfectly indicate by a
multiplicity of some such, simultaneously valid, antitheses: this,
there is no evidence to show, was ever really known to Kant.
What was religion for Augustine and Francis of Assisi, he
was unable to reproduce in himself; indeed religion, of this
type, he readily rejects as fanaticism. Here lay the limit both
of his own nature and of his own times." 1
The rich mind of Prof. Troeltsch is, perhaps, more en-
tirely just: cc As Kant's theory of knowledge is throughout
dependent upon the state of contemporary psychology, so
also is his theory of religious knowledge dependent upon
the psychology of religion predominant in his day. Locke,
Leibniz, Pascal had already recognized the essentially prac-
tical character of all religion; and since their psychology
was unable to conceive the' practical' otherwise than as the
moral, it had looked upon Religion as l\1:orality furnished
forth with its metaphysical concomitants. And as soon as
this psychology had become the very backbone of his con-
ception of Religion, Morality gained an entirely one-sided pre-
dominance over Kant's mind,-considerably, indeed, beyond
his own personal feelings and perceptions." For he remains
deeply penetrated by " the conceptions of Regeneration and
Redemption; the idea of divine Grace and Wisdom, which
accepts the totality of a soul's good disposition in lieu of that
soul's ever defective single good works; the belief in a
Providence which strengthens the Good throughout the world
against Evil; adoring awe in face of the majesty of the
1 j<.ant, 1904, pp. 129- 1 3 2 .
262 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
Supersensible " ; and" all these" conceptions" are no more
simply moral, they are specifically religious thoughts." 1
Such a fuller conception of religion is admirably insisted on
by that penetrating philosopher and historian of philosophy,
Prof. Windelband : " Actual Religion, in its complete reality,
belongs to all the spheres of life, and yet transcends
them all, as something new and sui generis. I t is first an
interior life-an apprehending, cognizing, feeling, willing,
accomplishing. But this accomplishing leads it on to being
also an exterior life; an acting out, according to their various
standards, of such feeling and willing; and an outward
expression of that inner life in general, in ritual acts and
divine worship. Yet this worship takes it beyond the little
circle of the individual, and constitutes the corporate acts of
a community, a social, external organization with visible
institutions. And yet Religion ever claims to be more than
the whole series of such empirical facts and doings, it ever
transcends mere earthly experience, and is an intercourse
with the inmost nature and foundation of all reality; it is a
life in and with God, a metaphysical life. All these elements
belong to the complete concept of actual religion." 2 I would
add, that they each stimulate the other, the external, e. g. being
not only the expression of the awakened internal, but also
the occasion of that awakening.
And the great Dutch scholar, Prof. O. P. Tiele, unex-
celled in the knowledge of the actual course taken by the
great religions of the world, declares: " All progress, not on]y
in Morality, but also in Science, Philosophy, Art, necessarily
exerts an influence upon that of Religion. But. . . Religion
is not, on that account, identical with Ethics any more than
with Philosophy or Art. All these manifestations of the
human spirit respond to certain needs of man; but none
of them, not even l\Iorality, is capable of supplying the
want which Religion alone can satisfy.... Religion
differs from the other manifestations of the human
mind" in this, that whereas "in the domain of Art,
the feelings and the imagination predominate; in that of
Philosophy, abstract thought is paramount"; and" the main
object of Science is to know accurately, whilst Ethics are
chiefly concerned with the emotions and with the fruit they
1 Das Historische in Kant's Religions-PhilosoPhie, Kant-Studien. 1904.
pp. 43, 44.
:& II Das Heilige," in Pt'äludien, 1903, pp. 356, 357.
IORALITY, MYSTICISM, AND RELIGION 263
yield: in Religion all these factors operate alike, and if their
equilibrium be disturbed, a morbid religious condition is the
result." 1
2. Ritschlian modification of Kant's view.
I t is deeply interesting to note the particular manner in
which Kant's impoverishment of the concept of religion has
been in part retained, in part modified, by the Ritschlian
school,-I am thinking especially of that vigorous writer,
Prof. Wilhelm Hermann.
(I) If in Kant we get the belief in God derived from reflec-
tion upon Goodness and Happiness, and as the only possible
means of their ultimate coalescence: in Hermann we still get
the Categorical Imperative, but the thirst for Happiness has
been replaced by the historic figure of Jesus Christ. (( Two
forces of different kinds," he says, " ever produce the certainty
of Faith: the impression of an Historic Figure which
approaches us in Time; and the
Ioral Law which, when
we have heard it, we can understand in its Eternal Truth.
Faith arises, when a man recognizes, in the appearance of
Jesus, that symbol of his own existence which gives him the
courage to recognize in the Eternal, which claims him in
the Moral Imperative, the source of true life for his own
self." 2-And these two sole co-efficients of all entirely living
religion are made to exclude, as we have already seen,
especially all Mysticism from the life of Faith. "True,
outside of Christianity, Mysticism will everywhere arise, as
the very flower of the religious development. But a Christian
is bound to declare the mystical experience of God to be a
delusion. Once he has experienced his elevation, by Christ
alone, above his own previous nature, he cannot believe that
another man can attain the same result, simply by means
of recoHection within his own self. . . . Vole are Christians
precisely because \ve have struck, in the person of Jesus, upon
a fact which is incomparably richer in content than the feel-
ings that arise within ourselves." U Only because Christ is
present for us can we possess God with complete clearness
and certainty." And, with Luther,-who remained, however,
thoroughly faithful to the Primitive and
lediæval high
esteem for the Mystical element of religion ;_u right prayer
is a work of faith, and only a Christian can perform it."
1 Elements of the Science of Religion. 1897, Vol. I, pp. 274. 275; Vol.
II, p. 23.
2 Der Verkehr des Cht'isten mit Gott. ed. 1892. p. 281.
264 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
And, more moderately: II We have no desire to penetrate
through Christ on to God: for we consider that in God
Himself we still find nothing but Christ." 1
(2) Now it is surely plain that we have here a most under-
standable, indeed respectable, reaction against all en1pty,
sentimental Subjectivism, and a virile affirmation of the
essential importance of the Concrete and Historical. And, in
particular, the insistence upon the supreme value and irre-
placeable character and function of Christ is profoundly true.
-Yet three counter-considerations have ever to be borne
in mind. (i) It remains certain that we do not know, or
experience anything, to which we can attribute any fuller
reality, which is either purely objective or purely subjective;
and that there exists no process of knowing or experiencing
such a reality which would exclude either the objective or
the subjective factor. U Whatever claims to be fully real,"
either as apprehending subject or as apprehended object,
U must be an individual . . . an organic whole, which has
its principle of unity in itself." The truly real, then, is a
thing that has an inside; and the sharp antithesis drawn,
although in contrary directions, by Aristotle and by Kant,
between the PhenomE;nal and the InteIligible worlds, does not
exist in the reality either of our apprehending selves, or of
our apprehended fellow-men, or God. 2 -But Hermann is so
haunted by the bogey-fear of the subjective resonance within
us being necessarily useless towards, indeed obstructive of, the
right apprehension of the object thus responded to, that he
is driven to follow the will-o'-the-wisp ideal of a pure, entirely
exclusive objectivity.
(ii) Bent on this will-o'-the-wisp quest of an exclusive
objectivity, he has to define all Mysticism in terms of
Exclusive Mysticism, and then to reject such an aberration.
U Wherever the influence of God upon the soul is sought and
found solely in an interior experience of the individual soul,
in an excitation of the feelings which is supposed directly to
reveal the true nature of this experience, 'lJiz. in a state of
possession by God, and this without anything exterior being
apprehended and held fast with a clear consciousness, without
the positive content of some mental contemplation setting
1 Der Verkehr des Christen mit Cott. ed. 1892. pp. 27. 28; 230. 231; 262; 23.
2 E. Caird. Development of Theology in the G"eek PhilosoPhers. Vol. I.
pp. 367. 362. The whole chapter. (f Does the Primacy belong to Reason
or to 'Vill? II pp. 350-382. is admirable in its richness and balance.
MORALITY, MYSTICISM, AND RELIGION 265
thoughts in motion and raising the spiritual level of the sours
life; there is Mystical Piety." 1
Now it is, of course, true that false Mysticism does attempt
such an impossible feat as the thing at which Hermann is thus
aiming. But, even here, the facts and problems are again
misstated. Just now the object presented was everything,
and the apprehending subject was nothing. Here, on the
contrary, the apprehension by the subject is pressed to the
degree of requiring the soul to remain throughout reflexly
aware of its own processes.
Already in 179B Kant had, in full acceptance of the
great distinction worked out by Leibniz in the years 1701-
1709, but not published till 1765, declared: (( \Ve can be
mediately conscious of an apprehension as to which we have
no direct consciousness"; and "the field of our obscure
apprehensions,-that is, apprehensions and impressions of
which we are not directly conscious, although we can conclude
without doubt that we have them,-is immeasurable, whereas
clear apprehensions constitute but a very few points within
the complete extent of our mental life." 2 This great fact
psychologists can now describe with greater knowledge and
precision: yet the observations and analyses of Pierre Janet,
William James, James Ward and others, concerning Subcon-
sciousness, have but confirmed and deepened the Leibnizian-
Kantian apprehensions. Without much dim apprehension,
no clear perception; nothing is more certain than this.
And it is certain, also, that this absence of reflex conscious-
ness, of perceiving that we are apprehending, applies not only
to impressions of sensible objects, or to apprehensions of
realities inferior in richness, in interiority, to our own nature,
but also, indeed especially, to apprehensions of realities
superior, in dignity and profundity of organization, to our
own constitution. When engrossed in a great landscape of
Turner, the Parthenon sculptures, a sonata of Beethoven,
Dante's Paradiso; or when lost in the contemplation of the
seen1ingly endless spaces of the heavens, or of the apparently
boundless times of geology; or when absorbed in the
mysterious greatness of Mind, so incommensurable with
1 Verkehr des Christen mit Gott, pp. IS, 16.
2 I. Kant, " Anthropologie," in Werke, ed. Berlin Academy, Vol. VII.
19 0 7, pp. 135, 13 6 . G. W. Leibniz, "Nouveaux Essais sur l'Entende-
ment," in Die philosoPhischen Schriften von G. W. L.," ed. Gerhardt,
Vol. V. 1882, pp. 8, 10; 45, 69. 100. 121, 122.
.
...
266 THE MYSTICAL ELE
IENT OF RELIGION
matter, and of Personality, so truly presupposed in all these
appreciations yet so transcendent of even their collecti vity-
\ve are as little occupied with the facts of our engrossment,
our self-oblivion, our absorption, or with the aim and use of
such immensely beneficial self-oblivion, as we are, in our
ordinary, loosely-knit states, occupied with the impression
which, nevertheless, is being produced upon our senses and
mind by some small insect or slight ray of light to which we
are not giving our attention, or which may be incapable of
impressing us sufficiently to be thus attended to and clearly
perceived.! And, as in the case of these under-impressions, so
in that of those over-impressions, we can often judge, as to
their actual occurrence and fruitfulness, only from their after-
effects, although this indirect proof will, in each case, be of
quite peculiar cogency.-All this leaves ample room for that
prayer of simple quiet, so largely practised by the Saints, and
indeed for all such states of recollection which, though the
soul, on coming from them, cannot discover definite ideas or
picturings to have been contained in them, leave the soul
braced to love, work, and suffer for God and man, beyond
its previous level. Prof. William James is too deeply versed
a Psychologist not fully to understand the complete normality
of such conditions, and the entire satisfactoriness of such
tests 2
(iii) And finally, it is indeed true that God reveals Himself to
us, at all fully, in Human History alone, and within this history,
more fully still, in the lives and experiences of the Saints of all
. the stages of religion, and, in a supreme and normative manner,
in the life and teaching of Jesus Christ; that we have thus a
true immanence of the Divine in the Human; and that it is
folly to attempt the finding or the making of any shorter way
to God than that of the closest contact with His o,VD con-
descensions. Yet such a wisely Historical and fully Christian
attitude would be imperilled, not secured, by such an excessive
Christocentrism, indeed such Panchristisl1Z, as that of Prof.
Hermann.
We shall indeed beware of all indifferentist levelling-
down of the various religions of the world. For, as Prof.
Robertson Smith, who knew so well the chief great religions,
most wisely said, cc To say that God speaks to all men alike,
1 All this first clearly formulated by Leibniz. oþ. cit. pp. 121, 122.
2 See his Varieties of Religious Experience, 1902, pp. 209-21 I; 242. 243;
and elsewhere.
MORALITY, MYSTICISM, AND RELIGION 26 7
aRd gives the same communication directly to all without the
use of a revealing agency, reduces religion to Pure Mysticism.
In point of fact it is not true of any man that what he believes
and knows of God, has come to him directly through the voice
of nature and conscience." And he adds : (( History has not
taught us anything in true religion to add to the New Testa-
ment. Jesus Christ still stands as high above us as He did
above His disciples, the perfect Master, the supreme head of
the fellowship of all true religion." 1
Yet we must equally guard against making even Our Lord
into so exclusive a centre and home of all that is divine, as to
cause Him to come into an entirely God-forsaken, completely
God-forgetting world, a world which did not and could not,
in any degree or manner whatsoever, rightly know, love, or
serve God at all; and against so conceiving the religion,
taught and practised by Him, as to deprive it of all affinity
\vith, or room for, such admittedly universal forces and
resultants of the human soul and the religious sense as are
dim apprehension, formless recollection, pictureless emotion,
and the sense of the Hiddenness and Transcendence of the
very God, Who is also Immanent and Self-Revealing, in various
degrees and ways, in every place and time. Indeed, these two
forces: the diffused Religiosity and more or less inchoate
religion, readily discoverable, by a generous docility, more or
less throughout the world of human souls, and the concentrated
spirituality and concrete, thoroughly characteristic Religion,
which has its culmination, after its ample preludings in the
Hebrew Prophets, in the Divine-Human figure and spirit of
Jesus Christ: are interdependent, in somewhat the way in
which vague, widely spread Subconsciousness requires, and is
required by, definite, narrowly localized Consciousness in each
human mind. Precisely because there have been and are
previous and simultaneous lesser communications of, and
correspondences with, the one (( Light that enlighteneth every
man that cometh into the world"; because men can and do
believe according to various, relatively preliminary, degrees
and ways, in God and a Providence, in Sin and Contrition,
\vithout a knowledge of the Historic Christ (although never
\vithout the stimulation of some, often world-forgotten, historic
personality, and ever with some real, though unconscious
approximation to His type of life and teaching), therefore can
1 The Pt'oPhets of Israel. 1882, pp. II. 12; 10, II.
268 TI-IE 1\fYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
Christ be the very centre, and sole supreme manifestation
and llleasure of all this light. Not only can Christ remain
supreme, even though Moses and Elijah, Amos and Isaiah,
Jeremiah and Ezekiel; and indeed, in their own other degrees
and ways, Plato and Plotinus, Epictetus and Marcus
AureJius, Gautama Buddha and Rabbi Akiba be all revered
as God-loved and God-loving, as, in various amounts, truly,
spiritually great: but only thus can His central importance be
fully realized.
There is certainly much in Our Lord's own attitude, as we
have already found, to demand such a view; and Clement of
Alexandria, Origen and St. Justin Martyr have emphasized it
continually. And there is no necessary Naturalism here--
for the position is entirely compatible with the profoundest
belief in the great truth that it is Grace which everywhere
produces the various degrees of God-pleasing reJigion to be
found scattered throughout the world. Father Tyrrell has
admirably said: " God's salutary workings in man's heart have
always been directed, however remotely, to the life of Grace
and Glory; of 'the Order of mere nature,' and its exigencies,
we have no experimental knowledge. . . . In the present
order, Theism is but embryonic Christianity, and Christianity
is but developed Theism: ' purely natural' religion is what
might have been, but never was." 1
(3) Now this must suffice as a sketch of the relations between
(Historical) Religion and Mysticism, and will have shown
why I cannot but regret that so accomplished a scholar as
Prof.
iorris J astrow should class all and every 11 ysticism,
whether Pure or Mixed, as so far forth a religious malady;
why I rejoice that so adn1irably circumspect an investigator
as Prof. C. P. Tiele should, (in the form of a strenuous
insistence upon the apprehension, indeed the ontological
action of, the Infinite, by and within the human spirit, as
the very soul and mainspring of Religion), so admirably
reinforce the fundamental importance of the Mystical appre-
hensions; why I most warmly endorse Prof. Rauwenhoff's
presentment of Mysticism as, with Intellectualism and
foralism, one of the three psychological forms of religion,
which are earh legitimate and necessary, and which each
require the check of the other two, if they are not to degenerate
each into some corruption special to the exclusive develop-
1 Lez Orandi. 1903. pp. xxix, xxxi.
MORALITY, MYSTICISM, AND RELIGION 269
ment of that particular form; and why I cordially applaud
the unequalled analysis and description by Prof. Eucken
of the manner in which" Universal Religion" is at work, as
an often obscure yet (in the long run) most powerful leaven,
throughout all specifically human life,-Sciences, Art, Philo-
sophy, and Ethics, calling for, and alone satisfied with, the
answering force and articulation of H Characteristic Religion,"
each requiring and required by the other, each already con-
taining the other in embryo, and both ever operating together,
in proportion as Man and Religion attain to their fullness.!
3. H erma1tn' s impossiblesÙnþlification concerning philosophy.
But what shall we say as to the relations between Religion
and Philosophy? Here again Hermann is the vigorous
champion of a very prevalent and plausible simplification.
" There exists no Theory of Knowledge for such things as we
hold to be real in the strength of faith. In such religious
affirmations, the believer demolishes every bridge between
his conviction and that which Science can recognize as real."
Indeed Hermann's attitude is here throughout identical with
that of his master, Albrecht Ritschl : Metaphysics of any and
every kind appear everywhere, to both writers, as essentially
unnecessary, unreal, misleading, as so much inflation and
delusion of soul.- Yet this again is quite demonstrably exces-
sive, and can indeed be explained only as an all but inevitable
recoil from the contrary metaphysical excesses of the Hegelian
school.
(I) Since the culmination of that reaction, "it has," as
Prof. H. J. Holtzmann, himself so profoundly historical and
so free from all extreme metaphysical bent, tells us, " become
quite impossible any further to deny the metaphysical factors
which had a share in constituting such types of New Testa-
ment doctrine as the Pauline and J ohannine. Indeed, not even
if we were to reduce the New Testament to the Synoptic
Gospels and the Acts on the one hand, and to the Pastoral
Epistles, the Epistle of James and the Apocalypse on the
other hand, would the elements which spring from speculative
sources be entirely eliminated. And since, again, the Old
Testament religion, in its last stage, assimilated similarly
j, M. Jastrow, The Study of Religion, 1901, pp. 279-286. C. P. Tiele,
Elements of the Science of Religion. 18 97, Vol. II, pp. 227-234; L. W.
E. Rauwenhoff, Religions-philosophie, Germ. tr.. ed. 1894, pp. 109-124.
R. Eucken, Del' Wahf'heitsgehalt del' Religion, 1901, pp. 59-- 2 3 8 ; 303-399.
There are important points in pp. 425-438. which I do not accept.
.
270 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
metaphysical materials from the East and from the West;
since Mohammedanism, in its Persian and Indian branches, did
the same with regard to the older civilized religions of Middle
and Eastern Asia; since also these latter religions received
a speculative articulation in even the most ancient times, so
that they are both Philosophy and Religion simultaneously :
we are forced to ask ourselves, whether so frequent a con-
con1Ítant of religion is satisfactorily explicable as a mere
symptom of falsification or decay." And whilst answering
that the primary organ for religion is Feeling and Conscience,
he points out how large an amount of Speculation was, never-
theless, required and exercised by a St. Augustine, even after
his unforgettable experiences of the sufferings attendant upon
Sin, and of their cure by Grace alone.!
(2) The fact is that, if man cannot apprehend the objects,-
the historic and other facts,-of Religion, without certain sub-
jective organs, dispositions, and effects, any more than can all
these subjective capacities, without those objects, produce
religious convictions and acts, or be waked up into becoming
efficient forces: neither can man thus experience and effect
the deepest foundations and developments of his own true
personality in and through contact with the divine Spirit,
without being more or less stimulated into some kind of, at
least rudimentary, Philosophy as to these his profoundest
experiences of reality, and as to their rights and duties
towards the rest of what he is and knows.
(3) Indeed his very Religion is already, in itself, the pro-
foundest 1\ietaphysical Affirmation. As the deeply historical-
minded Prof. Tiele admits_: " Every man in his sound senses,
who does not lead the life of a half-dormant animal, philoso-
phizes in his own way" ; and "religious doctrine rests on a
metaphysical foundation; unless convinced of the reality of
a supersensual world, it builds upon sand. JJ 2 Or as Prof.
Eucken, the most eloquent champion of this central character-
istic of all vital religion, exclaims: " If we never, as a matter
of fact, get beyond merely subjective psychological processes,
and we can nowhere trace within us the action of cosmic
forces; if we in no case experience through them an enlarge-
ment, elevation, and transformation of our nature: then not
all the endeavours of its well-meaning friends can preserve
religion from sinking to tke level of a mere illusion. Without a
1 Rothe.s Spekulatives System, 1899, pp. 25, 26.
:& Elements of the Science of Religion. 1897, Vol. II, pp. 61, 62.
MORALITY, MYSTICISM, AND RELIGION 27I
universal and real principle, without hyper-empirical processes,
there can be no permanence for religion." 1
(4) Some kind of philosophy, then, will inevitably accom-
pany, follow, and stimulate religion, were it only as the,
necessarily ever inadequate, attempt at giving a fitting ex-
pression to the essentially metaphysical character of belief
in a supersensible world, in God, in man's spiritual capacities
and in God's redemption of man. Not because the patient
analysis of the completer human personalities, (as these are
to be found throughout the length and breadth of history,)
requires the elimination of a wholesome Mysticism and a sober
Metaphysic from among the elements and effects of the fullest
Manhood and Religion; but because of the ever serious diffi-
culties and the liability to grave abuses attendant upon both
these forces, the inevitably excessive reactions against these
abuses, and the recurrent necessity of remodelling much of
the theory and practice of both, in accordance with the growth
of our knowledge of the human mind, (a necessity which, at
first sight, seems to stultify all the hyper-empirical claims of
both these forces) : only because of this have many men of
sense and goodness come to speak as though religion, even
at its fullest, could and should get on without either, con-
tenting itself to be a somewhat sentimental, Immanental
Ethics.
(5) Yet, against such misgivings, perhaps the most immedi-
ately impressive counter-argument is the procession, so largely
made up of men and of movements not usually reckoned as
exclusively or directly religious, whose very greatness,-one
which humanity will not let die,-is closely interwoven with
1\-iystical and Metaphysical affirmations. There are, among
philosophers, a Spinoza and a Leibniz, a Fichte, Hegel,
Schopenhauer, a Trendelenburg and a Lotze, with the later
stages of a John Mill, a Littré, and a Herbert Spencer; among
poets, a Pindar and Aeschylus, a Lucretius and Vergil, a
Lessing and a Goethe, a Wordsworth and a Browning; among
historians, a Thucydides and a Tacitus, a St. Simon and de
Tocqueville, a Carlyle, a Jacob Grimm, a Droysen and a
Ranke; among scientists, a Gopernicus and a Kepler, a
Newton, a Lyell, indeed, largely still, also a Darwin; and
among men of action, a Moltke and a Gordon, a Burke and
a von Stein. Shear any of these men of their Mystical and
1 Der Kamp! um einen geistigen Lebensinhalt. 1896. p. 309.
27 2 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
Metaphysical elements, and you will have shorn Samson of
his locks.
And if we can frame aeon trary list of men of force and
distinction, who have represented an un- or even an anti-
Mystical and anti-Metaphysical type: Caesar and Hannibal,
Napoleon and Bismarck, Voltaire and Laplace, Hume and
Bentham, Huxley and Mommsen, we must ever remember
the complex truth as to the Polarity of Life,-the strict neces-
sity of the movement towards an intensely close contact with
empirical reality, as well as of the movement back to recollec-
tion; the frequent sickliness of the recollective movement, as
found in the average practice of life, which cannot but produce
a reaction and contrary excess; and hence the legitimacy of
what this second type has got of positiveness and of corrective
criticism. Yet here too the greatness will consist directly in
what these men are and have, not in what they are not; and
wherever this their brutal-seeming sense of the apparent
brutalities of life is combined with an apprehension of a higher
world and of a deeper reality, there something fuller and more
true has been attained than is reached by such strong but
incomplete humanity alone.
4. Religion and Morality, their kinshiP and difference.
And, finally, as to Religion and Morality, we should note
how that the men, who deny all essential connection between
Religion and Mysticism and Religion and Philosophy, ever,
when they do retain Religion at all, tend to identify it with
l\lorality, if not as to the motives, yet as to the contents of
the two forces. And yet it is not difficult to show that, if
the relation between Religion and Morality is closer than that
between Religion and Philosophy, though not as intimate as is
that between Historical-Institutional Religion and Mysticism:
Religion and :1\Iorality are nevertheless not identical.
(I) This non-identity is indicated by the broad historical fact
that, though the development of Religion tells upon that of
Morality, and vice versa: yet that the rate of development of
these two forces is practically never the same, even in one
and the same soul, still less in anyone country or race. In
each case we get various inequalities between the two develop-
ments, which would be impossible" were the two forces different
only in name.
We reach again the same conclusion, if we note, what Dr.
Edward Caird has so well pointed out, " the imperfection of
the subjective religion of the prophets and psalmists of
l\10RALITY, MYSTICIS1\I, AND RELIGION 273
Israel,"-who nevertheless already possessed a very advanced
type of profoundly ethical religion,-" shown by its inability
to overcome the legal and ceremonial system of worship to
which it was opposed"; as, " in like manner, Protestantism
. . . has never been able decisively to conquer the system of
Rome." 1 For this, as indeed the failure of Buddhism to
absorb and supersede Hindooism, evidently implies that
Religion cannot find its full development and equilibrium in
an exclusive concentration upon Morality Proper, as alone
essential; and hence that complete Religion embraces other
things besides Morality..
Once more we find non-identity between the very Ethics
directly postulated by Religion at its deepest, and the Ethics
immediately required by the Family, Society, the State, Art,
Science, and Philosophy. As Prof. Troeltsch admirably puts
it, "the special characteristic of our modem consciousness
resides in the insistence both upon the Religious, the That-
world Ends, and upon the Cultural, This-world Ends,
which latter are taken as Ends-in-themselves: it is pre-
cisely in this combination that this consciousness finds its
richness, power, and freedom, but also its painful interior
tension and its difficult problems." "As in Christian Ethics
we must recognize the predominance of an Objective Religious
End,-for here certain relations of the soul to God are the
chief commandments and the supreme good,-so in the
Cultural Ends we should frankly recognize objective Moral
Ends of an Immanental kind." And in seeking after the
right relations-'between the two, we shall have to conclude
that" Ethics, for us, are not, at first, a unity but a multiplicity:
man grows up amongst a number of moral ends, the unifica-
tion of vlhich is his life's task and problenl, and not its starting-
point." And this multiplicity" is " more precisely" a polarity
in human nature, for it contains two poles-that of Religious
and that of Humane Ethics, neither of which can be ignored
without moral damage, but which, nevertheless, cannot be
brought under a common formula." "We can but keep a
sufficient space open for the action of both forms, so that from
their interaction there may ever result, with the least possible
difficulty, the deepening of the Humane Ends by the Christian
Ethics, and tJ:le humanizing of the Christian End by the
Humane Ethics, so that life may become a service of God
1 The Evolution of Religion, 1893. Vol. II, p. 3 1 3.
VOL. II. T
274 THE MYSTIGAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
within the Cultural Ends, and that the service of God may
transfigure the world." 1
We can perceive the difference between the two forces most
clearly in Our Lord's life and teaching-say, the Sermon on
the Mount; in the intolerableness of every exegesis which
attempts to reduce the ultimate meaning and worth of this
world-renewing religious document to what it has of literal
applicability in the field of morality proper. Schopenhauer
expressed a profound in tui tion in the words : " It would be
a most unworthy manner of speech to declare the sublime
Founder of the Christian Religion, whose life is proposed to
us as the model of all virtue, to have been the most reasonable
of men, and that his maxims contained but the best instruction
towards an entirely reasonable life." 2
(2) The fact is that Religion ever insists, even where it but
seems to be teaching certain moral rules and moti ves as
appropriate to this visible world of ours, upon presenting
them in the setting of a fuller, deeper world than that immedi-
ately required as the field of action and as the justification
of ordinary morality. Thus whilst, in Morality Proper, the
concepts of Responsibility, Prudence, Merit, Reward, Irre-
trievableness, are necessarily primary; in Religious Ethics the
ideas of Trust, Grace, Heroism, Love, Free Pardon, Spiritual
Renovation are, as necessarily, supreme. And hence it is not
accidental, although of course not necessary, that we often
find men with a keen religious sense but with a defective
moral practice or even conception, and men with a strong
moral sense and a want of religious perception; that Mystics,
with their keen sense for one element of religion, so often
seem, and sometimes are, careless of morality proper; and
that, in such recent cases (deeply instructive in their very
aberrations) as that of Nietzsche, we get a fierce anti-Moralism
combined with a thirst for a higher and deeper world than
this visible one, which not all its fantastic form, nor even all
Nietzsche's later rant against concrete religion, can prevent
from being essentially religious. 3
(3) \y e have then, here, the deepest instance of the la \v and
1 " Grund-probleme der Ethik." in Zeitschrift für Theologie und l{irche,
19 0 2, pp. 164; 166, 167; 172.
2 Die Welt als TVille und Vorstellung, I, Anhang, p. 653.
3 A. E. Taylor's The Problem of Conduct, 1901, contains, pp. 469-487.
a very vigorous and suggestive study of the similarities and differences
between Morality and Religion, marred though it is by paradox and
impatience.
l\1YSTIGISM AND LIMITS OF KNOWLEDGE 275
necessity which we have, so often, found at the shallo\\'er
levels of the spirit's life. For here, once more, there is one
apprehension, force, life,- This-world Morality,-which re-
quires penetration and developluent, in nowise destruction, by
another, a deeper power, That-world Ethics and Religion.
Let the one weaken or blunt the edge and impact of the
other, and it has, at the same time, weakened itself. For here
again we have, not a Thing which simply exists, by persistence
in its dull unpenetratingness and dead impenetrability, but a
Life, growing by the incorporation and organization, within
its ampler range, of lesser lives, each with its own legitimate
autononlY.
II. MYSTICISM AND THE LIMITS OF HUMAN KNOWLEDGE
AND EXPERIENCE.
But have not even the most sober-minded of the Partial
Mystics greatly exceeded the limits oÍ human knowledge,
more or less continuously, throughout their conclusions? Is
Kant completely in the wrong? And are not the Positivists
right in restricting all certain cognition to the experiences of
the senses and to the Mathematico-Physical Sciences built
upon those experiences? And, again, is there such a thing
at all as specifically Mystical Experience or Knowledge?
And, if so, what is its worth ?-I must keep the elaboration
of the (ultimately connected) question, as to the nature of
the realities experienced or known-as to the human spirit
and the Divine Spirit, and their inter-relations, hence as to
Pantheism and Personality-for the next chapter, and can
here but prepare the ground for it, by the elucidation of certain
important points in general Epistemology, and of the more
obvious characteristics of Mystical apprehension.
I. Positivist Episte1nology an error.
As regards general Epistemology, we may well take up the
following positions.
(I) We cannot but reject, with Prof. Volkelt, as a mere
vulgar error, the Positivist limitation of trans-subjectively
valid knowledge to direct sense-perception and to the laws of
the so-called Empirical Sciences. For, as he shows con-
clusively, the only fact which is absolutely indubitable, is that
of the bare occurrence of our (possibly utterly misleading)
sensations and impressions. Some of these are, it is true,
,.
276 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
accompanied by a certain pressure upon our minds to credit
them with trans-subjective validity; and the fact oÍ this (pos-
sibly quite misleading) pressure is itself part of our undeniable
experience. Yet we can, if we will, treat this pressure also as
no more than a meani
;less occurrence, and not as evidencing
the trans-subjective reality which it seems to indicate. No
man, it is true, has ever succeeded in consistently carrying
out such a refusal of assent,-sinceno scepticism is so thorough
but that it derives its very power, against the trans-subjective
validity of some of the impressions furnished with trans-
subjective pressure, from an utterly inconsistent acceptance, as
trans-subjectively valid, of other impressions furnished with a
precisely similar trans-subjective intimation. Yet the fact
remains that, in all such cases of trans-subjective pressure, the
mind has H an immediate experience of which the content is
precisely this, that we are justified in proceeding with these
concepts into what is absolutely beyond the possibility of being
experienced by us." H Positivistic Cognition," to which no
man, Positivist included, can systematically restrict himself,
"abides absolutely within the immediately experienced.
Logical Cognition," which every man practises surreptitiously
if not avowedly, H exceeds experience at every step, and
conceptually determines what is absolutely incapable of being
experienced, yet the justification for this kind of cognition is,
here also, an immediately experienced certitude." 1
We have, "then, immediately experienced presentations
which of themselves already constitute a knowledge,-our first
knowledge, and the only one possessed of absolute indubitable-
ness." And some of these presentations II are accompanied by
a kind of immediate certainty or revelation that, in some way,
they reach right into the Thing-in-Itself, that they directly
express something objectively valid, present in that Thing-
in-I tself "; and {{ this pressure ever involves, should the
contradictory of what it enunciates be admitted as objectively
existent, the self-destruction of objective reality."-{{ And this
pressure can, in anyone case, be resisted by the mind; an
act of endorsement, of a kind of faith, is necessary on the
part of the mind: for these presentations, furnished with such
pressure, do not transform themselves into the Things-in-
Themselves directly,-we do not come to see objective reality
simply face to face." 2 And we find thus that H in princiPle the
1 J. Volkelt, Immanuel Kant's Et'kenntnisstheorie, 1879, pp. 258. 259.
2 Ibid. pp. 206. 208. 2 0 9.
l\fYSTICISl\i AND LIMITS OF KNO\VLEDGE 277
entire range of reality, right down to its last depths, lies open
to cognition, proceeding according to the principle oÍ the
necessities of thought. For he who recognizes this principle,
thereby admits that the necessities of thought have trans-
subjective significance, so that, if any affirmation concerning
the ultimate reasons and depths of Reality can be shown to
be necessary in thought, this affirmation possesses as rightful
a claim to trans-subjective validity, as any determination,
necessary in thought, which concern only such parts of the
Thing-in-Itself as are the nearest neighbours to our sense-
impressions concerning it. Everywhere our principle leaves
us only the question whether thought, as a matter of fact, does
or does not react, under the given problems, with the said
logical constraint and pressure." 1
(2) We can next insist upon how we have thus already
found that the acquisition of even so rudimentary an outline
of Reality, as to be ever in part presupposed in the attacks
of the most radical sceptics, necessarily involves a certain
elTIotive disposition and volitional action. And, over and
above this partially withhold able assent, such quite elemen-
tary thinking will also ever require the concomitant energizing
of the picturing faculty. And again, the more interior and
spiritual are this thinking's subject-matters, the more will it
be permeated by, and be inseparable from, deep feeling. It
is then all man's faculties conjoined, it is the whole man, who
normally thus gives, without reflecting on it, his all, to gain
even this elementary nucleus of certainty as to Reality.
"Even receptivity," as Prof. Ward well says, "is activity" ; for
even where non-voluntary, it is never indifferent. "Not mere
receptivity, but conative or selective activity, is the essence
of subjective reality." Or, with Prof. V olkelt: "Purely
isolated thought,"-which, in actual life ever more or less oÍ
a fiction, is not rarely set up by individuals as an ideal,-u is,
however intensified and interiorized, something ever only
forn1al, something, in the final resort, insignificant and
shadowy."-And, concurrently with the recognition of this
fact, man will come to find that U the ultimate Substance or
Power of and in the world,"-that objective reality which
is the essential counterpart to his own subjective reality,-U is
something possessed of a true, deep content and of a positive
aim, and alive according to the analogy of a willing individual
1 J. Volkelt, Immanuel Kant's Erkenntllisstheorie. 1879, p. 244.
..
27 8 THE MYSTICAL ELEJ\lENT OF RELIGION
The world would thus be a Logical Process only in the sense
that this concrete fundamental Power is bound by the ideal
necessity of its own nature." 1
(3) And again, I would note with V olkelt how Kant, owing
to his notoriously intense natural tendency to universal
Dualism, never admits, even as a point for preliminary
settlement, the possibility that our subjective conceptions
of Objective Reality may have some true relation to that
Reality. His professed ignorance as to the nature of that
Reality changes instantaneously, quite unbeknown to himself,
into an absolute unvarying, negative knowledge concerning
that Reality,-he simply knows that it is utterly heterogeneous
to our conception of it. Thus he finds the view that ({ God
has implanted into the human mind certain categories and
concepts of a kind spontaneously to harmonize with things,"
to be H the most preposterous solution that we could possibly
choose." 2 Thus the epistemological difference between Pre-
sentation and Thing-in-Itself becomes a metaf>hysical ex-
clusion of each by the other. And yet we know of no fact,
whether of experience or of thought, to prevent something
which is my presentation existing also, in so far as it is the
content of that presentation, outside of this presentment.
Indeed Psychology and Epistemology have, driven by every
reason and stopped by none, more and more denied and
refuted this excessive, indeed gratuitous, Dualism.
As Prof. Henry Jones well puts it: H The hypothesis
that knowledge consists of two elements which are so
radically different as to be capable of description only by
defining each negatively in terms of the other, the pure
manifold or differences of sense, and a purely universal or
relative thought," breaks down under the fact that H pure
thought and the manifold of sense pass into each other, the
one proving meaningless and the other helpless in its
isolation." These elements " are only aspects of one fact,
co-relates mutually penetrating each other, distinguishable
in thought, but not separable as existences." Hence we must
not H make logical remnants do the work of an intelligence
which is never purely formal, upon a material which is
1 James Ward, Ie Present Problems of Psychology," in (American)
PhilosoPhical Review, 1904, p. 607. J. Volkclt, Kant's Erkenntnisstheorie.
p. 241.
t In a letter of 1772, BrieJe. ed. Berlin Academy. Vol. I, 1900,
p. 126.
iYSTICIS]\i AND LINIITS OF KNOWLEDGE 279
nowhere a pure manifold": for U the difference between
the primary data of thought on the one hand, and the
highest kinds of systematized knowledge on the other, is
no difference . . . between a mere particular and a mere
universal, or a mere content and a mere form; but it is a
difference in comprehensiveness of articulation." However
primary may be the distinction of subjective and objective,
" we are not entitled to forget the unity of the reality in which
the distinction takes place." If we begin with the purely
subjective, we must doubtless end there; but then, in spite
of certain, never self-consistent, philosophical hypotheses,
U the purely subjective is as completely beyond our reach as
the purely objective." 1
Prof. Ward indeed pushes the matter, I think rightly,
even a step further. He points out how readily, owing to
the ambiguous term (( consciousness," (( we confound experience
with knowledge" ; but holds that experience is the wider term.
(( Knowledge must fall within experience, and experience
extend beyond knowledge. Thus I am not left to infer my
own being from my knowing. . . . Objective reality is imme-
diately ( given,' or immediately ( there,' not inferred." But
the subjective reality is not immediately given, immediately
there. (( There is no such parallelism between the two. . . .
The subjective factor in experience is not datum but reci-
Piens: it is not ( there' but ( here'; a ( here' relative to that
( there.' "2 Nothing of this, I think, really conflicts with the
positions we have adopted from Volkelt, since (( experience"
is evidently used here in a sense inclusive of the presentations,
the trans-subjective pressure and the endorsement of the
latter's estimations,-the three elements which, according also
to Volkelt, form an organism which even the most daring
subjectivism can never consistently reject. At most, the
term (( experience" is more extended in Prof. Ward, since it
includes all three elements, than in Prof. V olkelt, who restricts
it to the two first.
(4) And further, we must take care to find room for
the only unforced explanation of the wondrous fact that
U although," as Dr. Volkelt strikingly says, (( the various
schools of philosophy "-this is largely true of those of theology
also,-are (( in part essentially determined by historical
1 H. Jones. A Critical Account oJ the Philosophy oJ Lotze. 1895. pp. 102-
104; 106, 107; 108, I I I.
2 The Present Problems, pp. 606. 607.
.
280 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
currents, forces which follow other standards than those of
logical necessity": yet (t these points of view and modes of
thought, thus determined by" apparently non-logical "history,
subserve nevertheless logical necessity, indeed represent its"
slow, intermittent, yet real" progressive realization." The
explanation is that" the forces of history are, unbeknown to
themselves, planned, in their depths, for agreement \vith the
necessities and ends of thought and of truth." U And thus
the different spheres" and levels" of spiritual life and endeavour
appear as originally intended for each other, so that each
sphere, whilst consciously striving only after its own particular
laws and standards, in reality furthers the objects of the rest."
For" only the operative presence of such an original, teleo-
logical inter-relation can explain how historic forces, by their
influence upon, and determination of, philosophical thinking,
can, instead of staining and spoiling it by the introduction of
religious, artistic, political, and other motives, actually advance
it most essentially." I-Here then we get a still further en-
largement of the already wide range of interaction, within the
human mind, between forces which, at first sight, appear
simply external to, indeed destructive of, each other; and a
corresponding increase in the indications of the immense
breadth, depth,andcloseness of inter-pen etration characterizing
the operative ground-plan, the pre-existing Harmony and
Teleology of the fundamental forces of Reality. Thus once
more man's spirit appears as possessed of a large interiority;
and as met, supported and penetrated, by a Spirit stupend-
ously rich in spiritual energy.
(5) And finally, let us never forget that (t the only experi-
ence immediately accessible to us " men, " is our own; this,
in spite of its complexity, is the first we know." 2 And this
means that we have direct experience and anything like
adequate knowledge, (because knowledge from within,) not
of things, but of mind and will, of spiritual life struggling
within an animal life ; and that in face, say, of plant-life, and
still more of a pebble or of a star, we have a difficulty as to
an at all appropriate and penetrative apprehension, which, if
opposite to, is also in a sense greater than, the difficulty
inherent to our apprehension of God Himself. For towards
this latter apprehension we have got the convergent testimony
1 J. Volkelt, ErJahrung und Denke1l, 1886, p. 4 8 5.
:2 James Ward, .. On the Definition of Psychology," in Journal oj
Psychology, Vol. I, 1904, p. 25.
MYSTICISl\! AND LIMITS OF KNOWLEDGE 281
of certain great, never quite obliterable facts without us and
within ourselves.
There is the upward trend, the ever-increased complexity
of organization, the growing depth and interiority in the
animate world,-Plant-Life itself being already, very prob-
ably, possessed of a vague consciousness, and l\ian, at the
other end of the scale, summing up the tendency of the whole
series in a deep self-consciousness which, at the same time,
makes him alone keenly aware of the great difference, in the
midst of the true kinship, between himself and the humbler
members of that one world. For Natural Selection can but
describe the results and explain part of the method of this
upward trend, but cannot penetrate to its ultimate cause
and end.
There is, again, the great, deep fact of the mutuany neces-
sary, mutually stimulating presence and interaction, within
our own mental and spiritual life, of sense-impressions,
imaginative picturings, rational categories, emotional activi-
ties, and volitional acts; and, again, of subject and object;
and, once more, of general, philosophic Thought and the
contingencies of History. For the immanental inter-adapta-
tion and Teleology, that mysteriously link together all these,
profoundly disparate-seeming, realms and forces is far too
deep-down, it too much surprises, and exacts too much of us,
it too much reveals itself, precisely at the end of much labour
of our own and in our truest and most balanced moods, as
the mostly unarticulated presupposition and explanation of
both the great cost and the rich fruitfulness of every approxi-
mately complete actuation of all our faculties, each with and
in the others, and in and with their appropriate objects, to be
permanently ruled out of court as mere sentimentalism or
baseless apologetic.
And there is' the deepest fact of all, the one which precisely
constitutes the specific characteristic of all true humanity, the
sense of mental oppression, of intolerable imprisonment in-
flicted by the very idea of the merely contingent, the simply
phenomenal and Finite, and the accompanying noble rest-
lessness and ready dwarfing of all man's best achievements
by the agent's own Ideal of Perfection. For this latter sense
is, precisely in the greater souls, so spontaneous and so keen,
so immensely operative in never leaving our, otherwise
indolent and readily self-delusive, self-complacent race fully
and long satisfied with anything that passes entirely away, or
,
282 THE MYSTICAL ELEl\IENT OF RELIGION
that is admittedly merely a subjective fancy, even though
this fancy be shared by every member of the human race:
and this sense operates so explosively within Sceptics as wen
as Dogmatists, within would-be Agnostic Scientists as well
as in the most Intellectualist Theologians; it so humbles,
startles, and alone so braces, sweetens, widens, indeed consti-
tutes our humanity: as to be unforcedly explicable only by
admitting that man's spirit's experience is not shut up within
man's own clear analysis or picturing of it; that it is indefi-
nitely wider, and somehow, in its deepest reaches, is directly
touched, affected, in part determined, by the Infinite Spirit
Itself. U Man never knows how anthropomorphic he is," says
Goethe. Yes, but it was a man, Goethe, it is at bottom all
men, in proportion as they are fully, sensitively such, who
have somehow discovered this truth; \vho suffer from
its continuous evidences, as spontaneously as from the
toothache or from insomnia; and whose deepest moments
give them a vivid sense of how immensely the Spirit, thus
directly experienced by their spirit, transcends, and yet also
is required by and is immanent in, their keen sense of the
Finitude and Contingency present throughout the world of
sense-perception and of clear intellectual formulation.
(6) With Plato and Plotinus, Clement of Alexandria and
St. Augustine, St. Bernard, Cardinal Nicolas of Coes and
Leibniz in the past; with Cardinal Newman, Professors
Maurice Blondel and Henri Bergson, Siegwart, Eucken,
Troeltsch and Tiel
, Igino Petrone and Edward Caird, in
the present; with the explicit assent of practically all the
great 11 ystics of all ages and countries, and the implicit
instinct, and at least partial, practical admission, of all sane
and developed human souls; we will then have to postulate
here, not merely an intellectual reasoning upon finite data,
which would somehow result in so operative a sense of the
Infinite; nor even simply a mental category of Infinitude
which, evoked in man by and together with the apprehension
of things finite, would, somehow, have so massive, so explosive
an effect against our finding satisfaction in the other categories,
categories which, after all, would not be more subjective, than
itself: but the ontological presence of, and the operative pene-
tration by the Infinite Spirit, within the human spirit. This
Spirit's presence would produce, on occasion of man's appre-
hension or volition of things contingent and finite, the keen
sense of disappointment, of contrast with the Simultaneous,
MYSTICISM AND LIl\lITS OF KNOWLEDGE 283
Abiding, and Infinite.-And let the reader note that this is
not Ontologism, for we here neither deduce our other ideas
from the idea of God, nor do we argue from ideas and their
clarity, but from living forces and their operativeness.
We thus get man's spirit placed within a world of varying
degrees of depth and interiority, the different levels and kinds
of which are necessary, as so many materials, stimulants,
obstacles, and objects, for the development of that spirit's
various capacities, which themselves again interact the one
upon the other, and react upon and within that world. For if
man's experience of God is not a mere discursively reasoned
conclusion from the data of sen
e, yet man's spirit experiences
the Divine Spirit and the spirits of his fellow-men on occasion
of, and as a kind of contrast, background, and support to, the
actuation of hi. senses, imagination, reason, feeling, and
volition, and, at least at first and in the long run, not
otherwise.
2. No dis#nct faculty of Myst'l'cal apprehension.
Is there, then, strictly speaking, such a thing as a speci-
fically distinct, self-sufficing, purely Mystical mode of appre-
hending Reality? I take it, distinctly not,. and that all the
errors of the Exclusive Mystic proceed precisely from the
contention that Mysticism does constitute such an entirely
separate, completely self-supported kind of human experience.
-This denial does not, of course, mean that soul does not
differ quite indefinitely from soul, in the amount and kind of
the recollective, intuitive, deeply emotive element possessed
and exercised by it concurrently or alternately with other
elements,-the sense of the Infinite within and without the
Finite springing up in the soul on occasion of its contact
with the Contingent; nor, again, that these more or less con-
genital differences and vocations amongst souls cannot and
are not still further developed by grace and heroism in to
types of religious apprehension and life, so strikingly diver-
gent, as, at first sight, to seem hardly even supplementary the
one to the other. But it means that, in even the most purely
contingent-seeming soul, and in its apparently but Institu-
tional and Historical assents and acts, there ever is, there
never can fail to be, some, however implicit, however slight,
however intermittent, sense and experience of the Infinite,
evidenced by at least some dissatisfaction with the Finite,
except as this Finitude is an occasion for growth in, and a
part-expression of, that Infinite, our true home. And, again,
.
284 THE MYSTICAL ELEl\IENT OF RELIGION
it means, that even the most exclusively mystical-seeming
soul ever depends, for the fulness and healthiness of even the
most purely mystical of its acts and states, as really upon
its past and present contacts with the Contingent, Temporal,
and Spatial, and with social facts and elements, as upon its
movement of concentration, and the sense and experience,
evoked on occasion of those contacts or of their l11emories, of
the Infinite within and around those finitudes and itself.
Only thus does Mysticism attain to its true, full dignity,
which consists precisely in being, not everything in anyone
soul, but something in every soul of man; and in pre-
senting, at its fullest, the amplest development, among certain
special natures with the help of certain special graces and
heroisms, of what, in some degree and form, is present in
every truly human soul, and in such a soul's every, at all genuine
and complete, grace-stimulated religious act and state. And
only thus does it, as Partial Mysticism, retain all the strength
and escape the weaknesses and dangers of would-be Pure
1\Iysticism, as regards the mode and character of Religious
Experience, Kno\vledge, and l.ife.
3. The first four pairs of weaknesses and strengths special to
the Mystics.
I take the Mystic's weaknesses and strengths to go together
in pairs, and that there ar
seven such pairs. Only the first
four shall be considered here; the fifth and the last two
couples are reserved respectively for the following, and for the
last section, of this chapter.
(I) The l\iystic finds his joy in the recollective movement
and movements of the soul; and hence ever tends, qua Mystic,
to ignore and neglect, or to over-minimize, the absolutely
necessary contact of the mind and will with the things of
sense. He will often write as though, could he but completely
shut off his mind from all sense-perceptions,-even of grand
scenery, or noble works of art, or scenes of human devoted-
ness, suffering, and peace,-it would be proportionately fuller
of God.- Y et this drift is ever more or less contradicted by
his practice, often at the very moment of such argument: for
no religious writers are more prolific in vivid imagery derived
from noble sensible objects and scenes than are the Mystics,
-whose characteristic mood is an intuition, a resting in a
kind of vision of things invisible.-And this contradiction is
satisfactory, since it is quite certain that if the mind, heart,
and will could be completely absorbed, (from the first or for
MYSTICIS
I AND LIMITS OF KNOWLEDGE 2 8 5
any length of time,) in the flight from the sensible, it would
become as dangerously empty and languid concerning things
invisible themselves as, with nothing but an outgoing
occupation with the sensible, it would become distracted
and feverish. I t is this aversion from Outgoing and from
the world of sense, of the contemporaneous contingencies
environing the soul, that gives to Mysticism, as such, its
shadowy character, its floating above, rather than penetrating
into, reality,-in contradiction, where this tendency becomes
too exclusive, to the Incarnational philosophy and practice
of Christianity, and indeed of every cOll1plete and sound
psychology.
And yet the Incoming, what the deep religious thinker
l(ierkegaard has so profoundly analyzed in his doctrine of
u Repetition," 1-recollection and peaceful browsing among
the materials brought in by the soul's Outgoing,-is most
essential. Indeed it is the more difficult, and, though never
alone sufficient, yet ever the more centrally religious, of the
two movements necessary for the q.cquisition of spiritual
experience and life.
(2) Again, the Mystic finds his full delight in all that
approximates most nearly to Simultaneity, and Eternity; and
consequently turns away, qua Mystic, from the Successive and
Temporal presented by History.- Y et here also there are two
movements, both necessary for man. He will, by the one,
once more in fullest sympathy with the grand Christian love
of lowliness, strive hard to get into close, and ever closer,
touch with the successivenesses of History, especially those of
Our Lord's earthly life and of His closest followers. With-
out this touch he will become empty, inflated, as St. Teresa
found to be the case with herself, when following the false
principle of deliberate and systematic abstraction from
Christ's temporal words and acts: for man's soul, though it
does not energize in mere Clock-Time, cannot grow if we
attempt to eliminate Duration, that interpenetrative, over-
lapping kind of Succession, which is already, as it were,
halfwa y to the Simultaneity of God. I t is this aversion from
Clock-Time Succession and even from Duration which gives to
Mysticism, as such, its remarkable preference for Spatial
images, and its strong bent towards concepts of a Static and
Determinist type, profoundly antagonistic though these are
1 There is a good description of this doctrine in H. Höffding's Sõren
Kierkegaard. Stuttgart. 1896. pp. 100-104.
286 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
to the Dynamic and Libertarian character which ever marks
the o
casions and conditions for the acquiring of religious
experIence.
And yet, here again, the Mystic is clinging, even one-
sidedly, to the more central, more specifically religious, of
the t\VO movements. For it is certain that God is indeed
Simultaneous and Eternal; that it is right thus to try and
apprehend, what appears to us stretched out successively in
time, as simultaneously present in the one great Now of God;
and that our deepest experiences testify to History itself
being ever more than mere process, and to have within it
a certain contribution from, a certain approximation to and
expression of, E terni ty.
(3) And again, the lVlystic finds his joy in the sense of a Pure
Reception of the Purely Objective; that God should do all
and should receive the credit of an, is here a primary
requirement.-And yet all penetrating Psychology, Epistem-
ology, and Ethics find this very receptivity, however seemingly
only such, to be, where healthy and fruitful, ever an action, a
conation of the soul,-an energizing and volition which, as we
have seen, are present in its very cognition of anything
affirmed by it as trans-subjective, from a grain of sand up to
the great God Himself. This antipathy to even a relative,
God-willed independence and power of self-excitation, gives
Mysticism, as such, its constant bent towards Quietism; and
hence, with regard to the means and nature of knowledge, its
tendency to speak of such a purely spiritual effect as Grace,
and such purely spiritual beings as the Soul and God, as
though they were literally sensible objects sensibly impressing
themselves upon the Mystic's purely passive senses. This
tendency reinforces the Mystic's thirst for pictorial, simul-
taneous presentation and intuition of the verities apprehended
by him, but is in curious contradiction to his even excessive
conceptions concerning the utter separateness and difference
from all things material of all such spiritual realities.-And
yet, here too, it is doubtless deeply important ever to re-
member, and to act in accordance with, the great truth that
God Himself is apprehended by us only if there be action
of our own, and that, from elementary moral dispositions
right up to consummate sanctity, the whole man has ever to
act and will more and more manysidedly, fully, and
persistently.
But the corresponding, indeed the anterior and more
MYSTICIS:\i AND LI1iITS OF KNOWLEDGE 2 8 7
centrally religious, truth here is, that all this range of our
activity could never begin, and, if it could, would lose itself in
vacuo, unless there already were Reality around it and within
it, as the stimulus and object for all this energizing,-a Reality
which, as Prof. Ward has told us with respect to Epistem-
ology, must, for a certain dim but most true experience
of ours, be simply given, not sought and found. And indeed
the operations of Grace are ever more or less penetrating and
soliciting, though nowhere forcing, the free assent of the
natural soul: we should be unable to seek God unless He
had already found us and had thus, deep down within our-
selves, caused us to seek and find Him. And hence thus again
the most indispensable, the truest form of experience underlies
reasoning, and is a kind of not directly analyzable, but
indirectly most operative, intuition or instinct of the soul.
(4) And yet the Mystic, in one of his moods (the correspond-
ing, contradictory mood of a Pantheistic identification of his
true self with God shall be considered in our next chapter), finds
his joy in so exalting the difference of nature between himself
and God, and the incomprehensibility of God for every finite
intelligence, as,-were we to press his words,-to cut away
all ground for any experience or knowledge sufficient to
justify him in even a guess as to what God is like or is not
like, and for any attempt at intercourse with, and at becoming
like unto, One who is so utterly unlike himself.
4. Criticism of the fourth pair, rnystical " Agnosticis1Jz."
Now this acutely paradoxical position, of an entire certainty
as to God's complete difference from ourselves, has been
maintained and articulated, with a consistency and vividness
beyond that of any l\Jlystic known to me, by that most
stimulating, profound, tragically non-mystical, religious ascetic
and thinker, the Lutheran Dane, Sören Kierkegaard (1813-
1855). His early friend, but philosophical opponent, Prof.
Höffding, describes him as insisting that "the suffering
incident to the religious life is necessarily involved in the
very nature of the religious relation. For the relation of
the soul to God is a relation to a Being utterly different
from man, a Being which cannot confront man as his Super-
lative and Ideal, and which nevertheless is to rule within him."
(( What wonder, then," as Kierkegaard says, " if the Jew held
that the vision of God meant death, and if the Heathen
believed that to enter upon relations with God was the
beginning of insanity?" For the man who lives for God
288 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
" is a fish out of water." I-We have here what, if an error, is
yet possible only to profoundly religious souls; indeed it
would be easy to point out very similar passages in St.
Catherine and St. John of the Cross. Yet Höffding is clearly
in the right in maintaining that U Qualitative or Absolute
difference abolishes all possibility of any positive relation. . . .
If religious zeal, in its eagerness to push the Obj ect of religion
to the highest height, establishes a yawning abyss between
this Object and the Hfe whose ideal It is still to remain,-such
zeal contradicts itself. For a God who is not Ideal and
Exemplar, is no God." 2
Berkeley raised similar objections against analogous
positions of the Pseudo- Dionysius, in his Alciphron in 1732.3
Indeed the Belgian Jesuit, Balthazar Corderius, has a very
satisfactory note on this matter in his edition, in 1634, of
the Areopagite,
in which he shows how all the negative
propositions of Mystical Theology, e. g. (( God is not Being,
not Life," presuppose a certain affirmative position, e. g. U God
is Being and Life, in a manner infinitely more sublime and
perfect than we are able to comprehend"; and gives reasons
and authorities, from St. Jerome to St. Thomas inclusive, for
holding that some kind and degree of direct confused know-
ledge (I should prefer, with modern writers, to call it
experience) of God's existence and nature is possessed by
the human soul, independently of its reasoning from the data
of sense.
St. Thomas's admissions are especially striking, as he
usually elaborates a position which ignores, and would
logically exclude, such (( confused knowledge." In his
Exposition and Questions on the Book of Boetius on the Trinity,
after arguments to show that we know indeed that God is,
but not what He is,-at most only what He is not, he says:
U We should recognize, however, that it is impossible, with
regard to anything, to know whether it exists, unless, in some
way or other, we know what it is, either with a perfect or with
a confused knowledge. . . . Hence also with regard to God,-we
could not know whether He exists, unless we somehow knew
what He is, even though in a confused manner." And this
1 Höffding's Kierkegaard, pp. 119. 120.
2 Ibid. p. 12 3.
3 See Works, ed. London. 1898, Vol. II, pp. 299-306.
4 Quaestio Mystica, at the end of the notes to Chapter V of Dionysius's
l\Jystical Theology, ed. J\ligne, 1889. Vol. I, pp. 1050-1058.
MYSTICISM AND LI
IITS OF KNOWLEDGE 289
knowledge of what Heis, is interestingly, because unconsciously,
admitted in one of the passages directed to proving that we
can but know that He is. U In our earthly state we cannot
attain to a knowledge of Himself beyond the fact that He
exists. And yet, among those who know that He is, the one
knows this more perfectly than the other." 1 For it is plain
that, even if the knowledge of the existence of something were
possible without any knowledge of that thing's nature, no
difference or increase in such knowledge of the thing's bare
existence would be possible. The different degrees in the
knowledge, which is here declared to be one concerning the
bare existence of God, can, as a matter of fact, exist only
in knowledge concerning His nature. I shall have to return
to this great question further on.
Here I would only point out how well Battista Vernazza
has, in her Dialogo, realized the importance of a modification in
such acutely dualistic statements as those occasionally met
with in the Vita. For, in the Dialogo, the utter qualitative
difference between God and the Soul, and the Soul and the
Body, which find so striking an utterance in one of Catherine's
moods, is ever carefully limited to the soul's sinful acts and
habits, and to the body's unspiritualized condition; so that
the soul, when generous and faithful to God's grace, can and
does grow less and less unlike God, and the body can, in its
turn, become more and more an instrument and expression of
the soul. A pity only that Battista has continued Catherine's
occasional over-emphasis in the parallel matter of the know-
ledge of God: since, even in the Dialogo, we get statements
which, if pressed, would imply that even the crudest, indeed
the most immoral conception of God is, objectively, no farther
removed from the reality than is the most spiritual idea that
man can attain of Him.
I t would indeed be well if the Christian Mystics who, since
about 500 A.D., are more and more dependent for their
formulations upon the Areopagite, had followed, in this
matter, not his more usual and more paradoxical, but his
exceptional, thoroughly sober vein of teaching,-that con-
tained in the third chapter of his Mystical Theology, where
he finds degrees of worth and a pproximation among the
affirmative attributions, and degrees of unfitness and distance
among the negative ones. U Are not life and goodness more
1 In Librum Boetii de Trinitate, in D. Thomae Aquinatis Opera. ed.
altera Veneta. Vol. VIII. 1776. pp. 341b. 342a; 2g1a.
VOL. II. U
290 THE MYSTICAL ELEl\fENT OF RELIGION
cognate to Him than air and stone? And is He not further
removed from debauchery and wrath, than from ineffableness
and incomprehensibility"? 1 But such a scale of approxima-
tions would be utterly impossible did we not somehow, at.
least dimly, experience or know what He is.
We shall then have to amend the Mystic's apparent
Agnosticism on three points. We shall ha ve to drop any
hard and fast distinction between knowledge of God's
Existence and knowledge of His Nature, since both
necessarily more or less stand and fall together. We shall
have to replace the terms as to our utter ignorance as to what
He is, by terms expressive of an experience which, if not
directly and independently clear and analyzable to the reflex,
critical reason, can yet be shown to be profoundly real and
indefinitely potent in the life of man's whole rational and
volitional being. I t is this dim, deep experience which ever
causes our reflex knowledge of God to appear no knowledge
at all. And we shall reject any absolute qualitative difference
between the soul's deepest possibilities and ideals, and God;
and shall, in its stead, maintain an absolute difference between
God, and all our downward inclinations, acts, and habits, and
an indefinite difference, in worth and dignity, between God
and the very best that, with His help, we can aim at and
become. With regard to every truly existent subject-matter,
we can trace the indefinitely wider range and the more delicate
penetration possessed by our dim yet true direct contact and
experience, as contrasted with our reflex analysis concerning
all such contacts and experiences; and this surplusage is at
its highest in connection with God, Who is not simply a
Thing alongside of other things, but the Spirit, our spirit's
Origin, Sustainer, and End, U in whom we live and move and
have our being."
III. MYSTICISM AND THE QUESTION OF EVIL.
Introductory: Exclusive and I nclusive Mysticism 'ln
Relation to Opt'l'mism.
The four couples of weaknesses and corresponding strong
points characteristic of Mysticism that we have just considered,
and the fact that, in each case, they ever spring respectively
1 Mystical Theology, Dr. Parker. pp. 135, 136. I have somewhat
modified Parker's rendering.
MYSTICISM AND THE QUESTION OF EVIL 29I
from an attempt to make Mysticism be the all of religion, and
from a readiness to keep it as but one of the elements more
or less present in, and necessary for, every degree and form of
the full life of the human soul: make one wish for two
English terms, as useful as are the German names (( M ystik J,
and "
Iystizismus," for briefly indicating respectively "the legi-
timate share of Feeling in the constitution of the religious life,
and the one-sidedness of a religion in which the Understand-
ing and the Will," and indeed also the Memory and the Senses,
with their respective variously external occasions, vehicles, and
objects, (( do not come to their rights," as Prof. Rauwenhoff
well defines the matter. l I somehow shrink from the term
" Mysticality " for his" Mystizismus " ; and must rest content
with the three terms-of" Mysticism," as covering both the
right and the wrong use of feeling in religion; and of " True"
or (( Inclusive Mysticism," and of (( Pseudo-" or " Exclusive
Mysticism," as denoting respectively the legitimate, and the
(quantitatively or qualitatively) mistaken, share of emotion in
the religious life.
Now the four matters, which we have just considered, have
allowed us to reach an answer not all unlike that of Nicolas
of Coes, Leibniz, and Hegel,-one which, if it remained alone
or quite final, would, in face of the fulness of real life, strike
us all, nowadays, as somewhat superficial, because too
Optimistic and Panlogistic in its trend. The fifth set of
difficulties and problems now to be faced will seem almost to
justify Schopenhauer at his gloomiest. Yet we must bear in
mind that our direct business here is not with the problem of
Evil in general, but only with the special helps and hindrances,
afforded by inclusive and by Exclusive Mysticism re-
spectively, towards apprehending the true nature of Evil and
turning even it into an occasion for a deeper good. In this
case the special helps and hindrances fall under three heads.
I. MysticiSl1t too opti1nistic. Evil positive, but not suprel1ze.
(1) First of all, I would strongly insist upon the following
great fact to which human life and history bear witness, if
we but take and test these latter on a large scale and with a
patient persistency. It is, that not the smoother, easier times
and circumstances in the lives of individuals and of peoples,
but, on the contrary, the harder and hardest trials of every
1 Religions-philosophie, German tr. ed. 1894, p. 116. His scheme finds
three psychological forms and constituents in all religion, Intellectualism.
Mysticism, Moralism, each with its own advantages and dangers.
292 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
conceivable kind, and the unshrinking, full acceptance of
these, as part of the price of conscience and of its growing
light, have ever been the occasions of the deepest trust in and
love of God to which man has attained. In Jewish History,
the Exile called forth a Jeremiah and Ezekiel, and the
profound ideal of the Suffering Servant; the persecution of
Antiochus Epiphanes raised up a Judas Maccabaeus; and the
troubles under the Emperor Hadrian, a Rabbi Akiba. And
in Christian History, the persecutions from Nero to Ro bespierre
have each occasioned the formation of heroic lovers of Love
Crucified. And such great figures do not simply manage to
live, apart from all the turmoil, in some Mystic upper region
of their own; but they face and plunge into the very heart of
the strife, and get and give spiritual strength on occasion of
this closest contact with loneliness, outrage, pain, and death.
And this fact can be traced throughout history.
Not as though suffering automatically deepens and widens
man into a true spiritual personality,-of itself it does not
even tend to this; nor as though there were not souls grown
hard or low, or frivolous or bitter, under suffering,-to leave
madness and suicide unconsidered,-souls in which it would
be difficult to find any avoidable grave fault. But that,
wherever there is the fullest, deepest, interiority of human
character and influence, there can ever be found profound
trials and sufferings which have been thus utilized and trans-
figured. It is doubtless Our Lord's uniquely full and clear
proclamation of this mysterious efficacity of all suffering
nobly borne; above all it is the supreme exemplification and
fecundity of this deepest law of life, afforded and imparted
by His own self-immolation, that has given its special power
to Christianity, and, in so doing, has, more profoundly than
ever before or elsewhere, brought home to us a certain
Teleology here also,-the deepest ever discovered to man.
For though we fail in our attempts at explaining how or why,
with an All-knowing, All-powerful, and All-loving God, there
can be Evil at all, we can but recognize the law, which is ever
being brought home to us, of a mysterious capacity for puri-
fication and development of man's spiritual character, on
occasion and with the help of trouble, pain, and death itself.
(2) Now all this, we must admit, is practised and noted
directly and in detail, only by the Ascetical and the Outward-
going elements in Religion; whereas Mysticism, as such, is
optimistic, not only as is Christianity, with respect to the end,
MYSTICISM AND THE QUESTION OF EVIL 293
but, in practice, with regard to the actual state of things already
encircling it as well. For so careful a selection and so rigorous
an abstraction is practised by Mysticism, as such, towards the
"velter of contingencies around it, that the rough shocks, the
bitter tonics, the expansive birth-pangs of the spirit's deeper
life, in and by means of the flux of time and sense, of the
conflict with hostile fellow-creatures, and of the claimfulness
of the lower self, are known by it only in their result, not
in their process, or rather only as this process ebbs and fades
away, in such recollective moments, into the distance.
No wonder, then, that Mysticism, as such, has ever tended
to deny all positive character to Evil. We have already
found how strongly this is the case with the prince of Mystic
philosophers, Plotinus. But even St. Augustine, with his
massive experience, and (in his other mood) even excessive
realization, of the destructive force of Evil and of the corrupt
inclinations of man's heart, has one whole large current of
teaching expressive of the purely negative character of Evil.
The two currents, the hot and concrete, and the cold and
abstract one, appear alternately in the very Confessions, of
397 A.D. There, ten years after his conversion, he can write:
" All things that are corrupted, are deprived of good. But, if
they are deprived of all good, they will cease to exist. . . .
In so far, then, as they exist, they are good. . . . Evil is no
substance." Notwithstanding such Neo-Platonist interpreta-
tions, he had found Evil a terribly powerful force; the directly
autobiographical chapters of this same great book proclaim
this truth \vith unsurpassable vividness,-he is here fully Chris-
tian.! And in his unfinished work against the Pelagianizing
Monk ]ulianus, in 429 A.D., he even declares-characteristic-
ally, whilst discussing the Origin of Sin: It Such and so great
was Adam's sin, that it was able to turn (human) nature
itself into this evil." Indeed, already in 4I8, he had main-
tained that" this wound" (of Original Sin) " forces all that is
born of that human race to be under the Devil, so that the
latter, so to speak, plucks the fruit from the fruit-tree of his
own planting." 2
1 Confessions: .. Evil. Negative,., VII. 12. etc. "Evil. Positive," VI.
15; VIII. 5, II. etc.
2 Opus lmperfectum. III. 56. ed. Ben.. Vol. X. col. 1750b. De Nuptiis
et Concupiscentia, I. 23. ibid. col. 625a.-M. L. Grandgeorge. in his memoir
St. Augustin et Ie Neo-Platonisme. 1896. gives an interesting collection of
such Negative and Positive declarations. and traces the former to their
precise sources in. Plotinus. pp. 126. 127; 130. 131.
.
294 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
Pseudo-Dionysius, writing about 500 A.D., has evidently
no such massive personal experience to oppose to the Neo-
Platonic influence, an influence which, in the writings of Proclus
(who died 485 A.D.), is now at its height. It Evil," he says, It is
neither in Demons nor in us, as an existent (positive) evil,
but (only) as a failure and dearth of the perfection of our own
proper goods." 1 He says this and more of the same kind,
but nothing as to the dread power of Evil. St. Thomas
Aquinas (who died in 1271 A.D.) is, as we know, largely under
the influence of the Negative conception: thus It the stain of
sin is not something positive, existent in the soul. . . . It is
like a shadow, which is the privation of light." 2
Catherine, though otherwise much influenced by the
Negative conception, as e. g. in her definition of a soul
possessed by the Evil Spirit as one suffering from a U priva-
tion of love," finds the stain of sin, doubtless from her own
experience, to be something distinctly positive, with consider-
able power of resistance and propagation. 3 -Mother Juliana
of Norwich had, in 1373, also formulated both conceptions.
U I saw not Sin, for I believe it hath no manner of substance,
nor no part of being" : N eo- Platonist theory. U Sin is so
vile and so mickle for to hate, that it may be likened to no
pain. . . . All is good but Sin, and naught is evil but Sin" :
Christian experience. 4
Eckhart had, still further back (he died in 1327 A.D.), in-
sisted much that U Evil is nothing but privation, or falling
away from Being; not an effect, but a defect" : 5 yet he also
finds much work to do in combating this somehow very
powerful It defect."-Not till we get to Spinoza (who died in
1677) do we get the Negative conception pushed home to its
only logical conclusion: H By Reality and Perfection, I mean
the same thing. . . . All knowledge of Evil is inadequate
knowledge. . . . If the human mind had nothing but adequa te
ideas, it would not form any notion of Evil." 6
(3) As regards the Christian Mystics, their negative concep-
tion of evil, all but completely restricted as it was to cosmolo-
1 Divine Names. ch. iv, sec. xxiv.
2 Summa Theol.. I. ii. quo 86. art. I ad 3.
a Vita, pp. 39b. 116b.
· Sixteen Revelations, ed. 19 0 2, pp. 69, 70.
Ii Meister Ekhart's .. Lateinische Schriften." published by Denifle.
At'chiv f. LitteratuJ' u. Kirchengeschichte des A-I. A., 1886, p. 662.
6 Ethica, II. def. vi; IV. prop. lxiv et coroll.; ed. Van Vloten et Land.
18 95. Vol. I. pp. 73. 225.
1:YSTICISM AND THE QUESTION OF EVIL 295
gical theory, did those Mystics themselves little or no harm;
since their tone of feeling and their volitional life, indeed a large
part of their very speculation, were determined, not by such
Neo-Platonist theories, but by the concrete experiences of Sin,
Conscience, and Grace, and by the great Ghristian historical
manifestation of the powers of all three.-It is clear too that
our modem alternative: U positive-negative," is not simply
identical with the scholastic alternative: U substantial-acci-
dental," which latter alternative is sometimes predominant in
the minds of these ancient theorizers; and that, once the
question was formulated in the latter way, they were pro-
foundly right in refusing to hypostatize Evil, in denying that
there exists any distinct thing or being wholly bad.- Yet it
is equally clear how very Greek and how little Christian is
such a preoccupation (in face of the question of the nature
of Evil) with the concepts of Substance and Accident, rather
than with that of Will; and how strangely insufficient,
in view of the tragic conflicts and ruins of real life, is all
even sporadic, denial, of a certain obstructive and destruc-
tive efficacy in the bad will, and of a mysterious, direct
perversity and formal, intentional malignity in that will at its
worst.
(4) On these two points it is undeniable that Kant (with all
his self-contradictions, insufficiencies, and positive errors on
other important matters) has adequately formulated the prac-
tical dispositions and teachings of the fully awakened Ghristian
consciousness, and hence, pre-eminently, of the great Saints in
the past, although, in the matter of the perverse wiIJ, the
Partial Mystics have, even in their theory, (though usually
only as part of the doctrine of Original Sin,) largely fore-
stalled his analysis. U Nowhere in this our world, nowhere
even outside it, is anything thinkable as good without any
reservation, but the good will alone." U That a corrupt in-
clination to evil is rooted in man, does not require any
formal proof, in view of the clamorous examples furnished
to all men by the experience of human behaviour. If you
would have such cases from the so-called state of nature,
where some philosophers have looked for the chief home
of man's natural goodness, you need only compare, with
such an hypothesis, the unprovoked cruelties enacted in
Tofoa, New Zealand . . . and the ceaseless scenes of murder
in the North-Western American deserts, where no human
being derives the slightest advantage from them,-and you
296 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
will quickly have more than sufficient evidence before you
to induce the abandonment of such a view. But if you
consider that human nature is better studied in a state of
civilization, since there its gifts have a better chance of de-
velopment,-you will have to listen to a long melancholy
string of accusations: of secret falseness, even among friends;
of an inclination to hate him to whom we owe much; of a
cordiality which yet leaves the observation true that t there
is something in the misfortune of even our best friend which
does not altogether displease us': so that you will quickly have
enough of the vices of culture, the most offensive of all, and
will prefer to turn away your look from human nature
altogether, lest you fall yourself into another vice,-that of
hatred of mankind." 1
It is sad to think how completely this virile, poignant
sense of the dread realities of human life again disappeared
from the teachings of such post-Kantians as Hegel and
Schleiermacher,-in other important respects so much more
satisfactory than Kant. As Mr. Tennant has well said, in
a stimulating book which, on this point at least, voices the
unsophisticated, fully awakened conscience and Christian
sense with refreshing directness, H for Jesus Christ and for the
Christian consciousness, sin means something infinitely deeper
and more real than what it can have meant for Spinoza or
the followers of Hegel." 2 Here again we have now in
Prof. Eucken, a philosopher who, free from ultimate Pes-
simism, lets us hear once more those tones which are alone
adequate to the painful reality. H In great things and in
small, there exists an evil disposition beyond all simple
selfishness: hatred and envy, even where the hater's self-
interest is not touched; an antipathy to things great and
divine; a pleasure found in the disfigurement or destruction
of the Good. . . . Indeed the mysterious fact of Evil, as a
positive opposition to Good, has never ceased to occupy the
deepest minds. . . . The concept of moral guilt cannot be got
rid of, try as we may." 3
(5) And yet even with regard to this matter, Mysticism re-
1 Gf'undlegung ZUr MetaPhysik der Sitten. 1785. Werke. ed. Berlin
Academy. Vol. IV. 1903. p. 393. Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der
reinen Vernunft. 1793. Werke. ed. Hartenstein. Vol. VI. 1868. pp. 127.
128.
Z The Origin and Propagation of Sin. 1902. p. 125.
I Wahrheits-gehalt der Religion. 1901. pp. 271. 27 2 .
MYSTICISM AND THE QUESTION OF EVIL 297
presents a profound compensating truth and movement, which
we cannot, without grave detriment, lose out of the complete
religious life. For in life at large, and in human life and
history in particular, it would be sheer perversity to deny that
there is much immediate, delightful, noble Beauty, Truth, and
Goodness; and these also have a right to the soul's careful,
ruminating attention. And it is the Mystical element that
furnishes this rumination.-Again, U it is part of the essential
character of human consciousness, as a Synthesis and an
organizing Unity, that, as long as the life of that consciousness
lasts at all, not only contrast and tension, but also concentra-
tion and equilibrium must manifest themselves. Taking life's
standard from life itself, we cannot admit its decisive con-
stituent to lie in tension alone." 1 And it is the Mystical mood
that helps to establish this equilibrium.-And finally, deep
peace, an overflowing possession and attainment, and a noble
joy, are immensely, irreplaceably powerful towards growth in
personality and spiritual fruitfulness. Nothing, then, would be
more shortsighted than to try and keep the soul from a deep,
ample, recollective movement, from feeding upon and relishing,
from as it were stretching itself out and bathing in, spiritual air
and sunshine, in a rapt admiration, in a deep experience of
the greatness, the beauty, the truth, and the goodness of the
World, of Life, of God.
2. Mysticism and the Origin of Evil.
The second hindrance and help, afforded respectively by
Exclusive and by Inclusive
1: ysticism in the matter of Evil,
concerns the question of its Origin.
(I) Now it appears strange at first sight that, instead of first
directly realizing and picturing the undeniable, profoundly
important facts of man's interior conflict, his continuous lapses
from his own deepest standard, and his need of a help not his
own to become what he cannot but wish to be, and of leaving
the theory as to how man came by this condition to the second
place; the Mystics should so largely-witness Catherine-
directly express only this theory, and should face what is
happening hic et nunc all but exclusively under the picture
of the prehistoric beginnings of these happenings, in the state
of innocence and the lapse of the first man. For men of other
religious modalities have held this doctrine as firmly as the
Mystics, yet have mostly dwelt directly upon the central core
1 Prof. HöfIding. in his Sõren Kierkegaard, pp. 130. 131.
.
2g8 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
of goodness and the weakness and sinfulness to be found
in man; whilst the 1\1 ystics had even less scruple than
other kinds of devout souls in embodying experimental
truths in concepts and symbols other than the common ones.
(2) I think that, here again, it was the Neo-Platonist literary
influence, so strong also on other points with the Mystics
of the past, and a psychological trend characteristic of the
1\iystical habit of mind, which conjoined thus to concentrate
the 1\iystic's attention upon the doctrines of Original Justice
and of a First Lapse, and to give to these doctrines the pe-
culiar form and tone taken on by them here. We have noted,
for instance, in the case of Catherine herself, how powerfully
her thought and feeling, as to the first human soul's first lapse
into sin, is influenced by the idea of each human soul's lapse
into a body; and we have found this latter idea to be, not-
withstanding its echoes in the Deutero-Canonical Book of
Wisdom and in one non-doctrinal passage in St. Paul, not
Christian but Neo-Platonist. Yet it is this strongly anti-
body idea that could not fail to attract Mysticism, as such.-
And the conception as to the plenary righteousness of that
first soul before its lapse, which she gets from Christian
theology, is similarly influenced, in her theorized emotion
and thought, by the Neo-Platonist idea of every soul having
already existed, perfectly spotless, previous to its incarnation:
a view which could not but immensely attract such a high-
strung temperament, with its imlnense requirement of some-
thing fixed and picturable on \vhich to rest. Thus here the
ideal for each soul's future would have been already real in
each soul's past. In this past the soul would have been, as it
were, a mirror of a particular fixed size and fixed intensity
of lustre; its business here below consists in removing the
impurities adhering to this mirror's surface, and in guarding
it against fresh stains.
(3) Now it is ,veIl known how it was St. Augustine, that
mighty and daring, yet at times ponderous, intellect, who, (so
long a mental captive of the Manichees and then so profoundly
influenced by Plotinus,) was impelled, by the experiences of his
own disordered earlier life and by his ardent African nature, to
formulate by far the most explicit and influential of the
doctrines upon these difficult matters. And if, with the aid of
the Abbé Turmel's admirable articles on the subject, we can,
with a fairly open mind, study his successive, profoundly vary-
ing, speculations and conclusions concerning the Nature and
MYSTICISM AND THE QUESTION OF EVIL 299
Origin of Sin,! we shall not fail to be deeply impressed with
the largely impassable maze of opposite extremes, contradic-
tions and difficulties of every kind, in which that adventurous
mind involved itself.-And to these difficulties immanent to
the doctrine,-at least, in the form it takes in St. Augustine's
hands,-has, of course, to be added the serious moral danger
that would at once result, were we, by too emphatic or literal
an insistence upon the true guiltiness of Original sin, to
weaken the chief axiom of all true morality-that the con-
currence of the personality, in a freely-willed assent, is
necessarily involved in the idea of sin and guilt.-And now
the ever-accumulating number and weight of even the most
certain facts and most moderate inductions of Anthropology
and Ethnology are abolishing all evidential grounds for holding
a primitive high level of human knowledge and innocence,
and a single sudden plunge into a fallen estate, as above,
apparently against, all our physiological, psychological,
historical evidences and analogies, (which all point to a
gradual rise from lowly beginnings,) and are reducing such
a conception to a pure postulate of Theology.
Yet Anthropology and Ethnology leave'in undisturbed
possession the great truths of Faith that It man's condition
denotes a fall from the Divine intention, a parody of God's
purpose in human history," and that It sin is exceedingly sinful
for us in whom it is a deliberate grieving of the Holy Spirit" ;
and they actually reinforce the profound verities that It the
realization of our better self is a stupendously difficult task,"
and as to It l\lan's crying need of grace, and his capacity for a
gospel of Redemption." 2 But they point, with a force great
in proportion to the highly various, cumulatively operative,
immensely interpretative character of the evidcnce,-to the
conclusion that It Sin," as the Anglican Archdeacon \Vilson
strikingly puts it, It is . . . the survival or misuse of habits
and tendencies that were incidental to an earlier stage of
development. . . . Their sinfulness would thus lie in their
anachronism, in their resistance to the. . . Divine force that
makes for moral development and righteousness." Certainly
1 II Le Dogme du Pðché Originc1 dans S. Augustin," Revue d'Histoire
et de Littérature ReligiJuses, 1901, 1902. See too F. R. Tennant, The
Sources of the Doctrine of the Fall and Original Sin, 1903, which, how-
ever, descends only to St. Ambrose inclusively.
2 So F. R. Tennant, The Origin and Propagation of Sin, 1902. pp. 131.
110.
300 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
(( the human infant" appears.to careful observers, as Mr. Tennant
notes, U as simply a non-moral animal," with corresponding
impulses and propensities. According to this view U morality
consists in the formation of the non-moral material of nature
into character . . ."; so that U if goodness consists essentially
in man's steady moralization of the raw material of morality, its
opposite, sin, cannot consist in the material awaiting moraliza-
tion, but in the will's failure to completely moralize it:'
U Evil" would thus be U not the result of a transition from the
good, but good and evil would" both alike U bë voluntary
developments from what is ethically neutral." 1 Dr. Wilson
finds, accordingly, that U this conflict of freedom and conscience
is precisely what is related as ( the Fall' sub specie historiae."
Scripture U tells of the fall of a creature from unconscious
innocence to conscious guilt. But this fall from innocence"
would thus be, U in another sense, a rise to a higher grade of
being." 2
(4) It is, in any case, highly satisfactory for a Catholic
to remember that the acute form, given to the doctrine of
Original Sin by St. Augustine, has never been finally accepted
by the Catholic Roman Church; indeed, that the Tridentine
Definition expressly declares that Concupiscence does not, in
strictness, possess the nature of Sin, but arises naturally, on
the withdrawal of the donum superadditu11z,-SO that Mr.
Tennant can admit, in strictest accuracy, that U in this respect,
the Roman theology is more philosophical than that of the
Symbols of Protestant Christendom:. 3 It is true that the
insistence upon U Original Sin" possessing somehow U the true
and proper nature of Sin " remains a grave difficulty, even
in thi8 Tridentin
formulation of the doctrine; whilst the
objections, already referred to as accumulating against the
theory in general, retain some of their cogency against other
parts of this decree.- Y et we have here an impressive pro-
clamation of the profound est truths: the spiritual greatness
of God's plan for us, the substantial goodness of the material
still ready to our hand for the execution of that plan, and
His necessary help ever ready from the first; the reality
of our lapse, away from all these, into sin, and of the effects of
such lapse upon the soul; the abiding conflict between sense
and spirit, the old man and the new, within each one of us ;
1 F. R. Tennant. The Origin and Propagation of Sin. 1902, pp. 82, 95;
107,108; 115.
:& Ibid. p. 83. · Ibid. p. 153.
lVIYSTIGISM AND THE QUESTION OF EVIL 30t
and the close solidarity of our poor, upward-aspiring, down-
ward-plunging race, in evil as well as in good.
(5) And as to the Christian Mystics, their one particular
danger here,-that of a Static Conception of man's spirit as
somehow constituted, from the first, a substance of a definite,
final size and dignity, which but demands the removal of
disfiguring impurities, is largely eliminated, even in theory,
and all but completely overcome in practice, by the doctrine
and the practice of Pure Love. For in U Charity" we get
a directly dynamic, expansive conception and experience:
man's spirit is, at first, potential rather than actual, and has to
be conquered and brought, as it were, to such and such a size
and close-knitness of organization, by much fight with, and
by the slow transformation of, the animal and selfish nature.
Thus Pure Love, Charity, Agape, has to fight it out, inch by
inch, with another, still positive force, impure love, concu-
piscence, Eros, in all the latter's multiform disguises. Here
Purity has become something intensely positive and of bound-
less capacities for growth; as St. Thomas says, U Pure Love
has no limit to its increase, for it is a certain participation in
the Infinite Love, which is the Holy Spirit." L-In this utterly
real, deeply Christian way do these Mystics overcome Neo-
Platonist static abstractions, and simultaneously regain, in
their practical theory and emotional perception, the great
truth of the deep, subtle force of Evil, against which Pure
Love has to stand, in virile guard, as long as earth's vigil lasts.
And the longest and most difficult of these conflicts is found,
-here again in utterly Christian fashion,-not in the sensual
tendencies proceeding from the body, but in the self-adoration,
the solipsism of the spirit. We have found this in Catherine:
at her best she ever has something of the large Stoic joy at
being but a citizen in a divine Cosmopolis; yet but Love and
Humility, those profoundest of the Christian affections, have
indefinitely deepened the truth of the outlook, and the range
of the work to be done, in and for herself and others.
(6) Yet even apart from Pure Love, Mysticism can accurately
be said to apprehend an important truth when, along its static
line of thought and feeling, it sees each soul as, from the first,
a substance of a particular, final size. For each soul is
doubtless intended, from the first, to express a particular
thought and wish of God, to form one, never simply replaceable
I. Summa Theol., II, n. quo 24. art. 7. in corp.
,
--
302 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
member in His Kingdom, to attain to a unique kind and
degree of personality: and though it can refuse to endorse
and carry out this plan, the plan remains within it, in the form
of never entirely suppressible longings. The Mystic, then,
sees much here also.
3. The warfare against Evil. Pseudo-Mysticism.
The third of the relations between Mysticism and the
conception and experience of Evil requires a further eluci-
dation of an important distinction, which we have already
found at work all along, more or less consciously, between
the higher and the lo\ver Mysticism, and their respective,
profoundly divergent, tempers, objects, and range.
(r) Prof. Münsterberg discriminates between these two
Mysticisms with a brilliant excessiveness, and ends by
reserving the word U Mysticism " for the rej ected kind alone.
U As soon as we speak of psychical objects,-of ideas, feelings,
and volitions,-as subject-matters of our direct consciousness
and experience, we have put before ourselves an artificial
product, a transformation, to which the categories of real life
no longer apply." In this artificial product causal connections
have taken the place of final ends. But U History, Practical
Life, . . . Morality, Religion have nothing to do with these
psychological constructions; the categories of Psychology,"
treated by Münsterberg himself as a Natural, Determinist
Science, " must not intrude into their teleological domains.
But if," on the other hand, U the categories belonging to
Reality," which is Spiritual and Libertarian, U are forced on
to the psychological system, a system which was framed ., by
our mind U in the interest of causal explanation, we get a
cheap mixture, which satisfies neither the one aim nor the
other. Just this is the effec t of Mysticism. I t is the personal,
emotional view applied, not to the world of Reality, where it
fits, but to the Physical and Psychological worlds, which are
constructed by the human logical will, with a view to gaining
an impersonal, unemotional causal system. . . . The ideals of
Ethics and Religion. . . have now been projected into the
atomistic structure" (of the Causal System), U and have thus
become dependent upon this system's nature; they find their
fight of existence limited to the regions where ignorance of
Nature leaves blanks in the Causal System, and have to tremble
at every advance which Science makes:' It is to this projection
alone that Münsterberg would apply the term U Mysticism,"
which thus becomes exclusively U the doctrine that the pro-
MYSTICISM AND THE QUESTION OF EVIL 303
cesses in the world of physical and psychical objects are not
always subject to natural laws, but are influenced, at times, in
a manner fundamentally inexplicable from the standpoint of
the causal conception of Nature. . . . Yet, the special interest
of the Mystic stands and falls here with his conviction that,
in these extra-causal combinations," thus operative right
within and at the level of this causal system, (( we have a "
direct, demonstrable (( manifestation of a positive system of
quite another kind, a System of Values, a system dominated,
not by Mechanism, but by Significance." 1
(2) Now we have been given here a doubtless excessively
antithetic and dualistic picture of what, in actual life, is a
close-knit variety in unity,-that interaction bet\veen, and
anticipation of the whole in, the parts, and that indication of
the later stages in the earlier,-which is so strikingly operative
in the order and organization of the various constituents
and stages of the processes and growth of the human mind
,and character, and which appears again in the Reality
apprehended, reproduced, and enriched by man's powers.
Even in the humblest of our Sense-perceptions, there is
already a mind perceiving and a Mind perceived; and, in the
most abstract and artificial of our intellectual constructions,
there is not only a logical requirement, but also, underlying
this requirement as this cause's deepest cause, an ever-growing
if un articulated experience and sense that only by the closest
contact with the most impersonal-seeming, impersonally con-
ceived forces of life and nature, and by the deepest recollection
within its own interior world of mind and will, can man's soul
adequately develop and keep alive, within itself, a solid degree
and consciousness of Spirit, Free-will, Personality, Eternity,
and God. Thus, in proportion as he comes more deeply to
advance in the true occasions of his spirit's growth, does man
still further emphasize and differentiate these two levels: the
shallower, spatial-temporal, mathematico-physical, quantita-
tiveand determinist aspect of reality and level of apprehension;
and the deeper, alone at all adequate, experience of all the
fuller degrees of Reality and effectuations of the spirit's life,
with their overlapping, interpenetrating Succession, (their
Duration), and their Libertarianism, Interiority, and Sense
of the Infinite. He thus emphasizes both levels, because the
determinist level is found to be, though never the source or
1 Psychology and Life. 1899. pp. 267. 268. Grundzüge der Psychologie.
Vol. I. 19 00 . pp. 170. 171.
304 THE MYSTIGAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
direct cause, yet ever a necessary awakener and purifier of
the Libertarian level.
Strictly within the temporal-spatial, quantitative method
and level, indeed, we can nowhere find Teleology; but if we
look back upon these quantitative superficialities from the
qualitative, durational and personal, spiritual level and stand-
point, (which alone constitute our direct experience,) we find
that the quantitative, causal level and method is everywhere
inadequate to exhaust or rightly to picture Reality, in exact
proportion to this reality's degree of fulness and of worth.
From the simplest Vegetable-Cell up to Orchids and Insecti-
vorous Plants; from these on to Protozoans and up, through
Insects, Reptiles, and Birds, to the most intelligent of Domestic
Animals; from these on to Man, the Savage, and up to the
most cultured or saintly of human personalities: we have
everywhere, and increasingly, an inside, an organism, a subject
as well as an object,-a series which is, probably from the first,
endowed with some kind of dim consciousness, and which
increasingly possessed of a more and more definite conscious-
ness, culnlinates in the full self-consciousness of the most fully
human man. And everywhere here, though in indefinitely
increasing measure, it is the individualizing and historical,
the organic and soul-conceptions and experiences which con-
stitute the most characteristic and important truths and
reality about and in these beings. For the higher up we
get in this scale of Reality, the more does the Interior
determine and express itself in the Exterior, and the more
does not only kind differ from kind of being, but even the
single individual from the other individuals within each
several kind. And yet nowhere, not even in free-willing,
most individualized, personal Man do we find the quanti-
tative, determinist envelope simply torn asunder and reveal-
ing the qualitative, libertarian spirit perfectly naked and
directly testable by chronometer, measuring-rod, or crucible.
The spirit is thus ever like unto a gloved hand, which, let it
move ever so spontaneously, will ever, in the first instance,
present the five senses with a glove which, to their exclusive
tests, appears as but dead and motionless leather.
(3) Now we have already in Chapter IX studied the con-
trasting attitudes of Catherine and her attendants towards one
class of such effects,-those attributed to the Divine Spirit,-
and hence, in principle, towards this whole question. Yet it
is in the matter of phenomena, taken to be directly Diabolic
MYSTICISM AND THE QUESTION OF EVIL 305
or Preternatural, that a Pseudo-Mysticism has been specially
fruitful in strangely materialistic fantasies. As late as r774
the Institutiones Theologiae Mysticae of Dam Schram, O.S.B.,
a book which even yet enjoys considerable authority,
still solemnly described, as so many facts, cases of
Diabolical Incubi and Succubae. Even in r836-r842 the
layman Joseph Görres could still devote a full half of his
widely influential Mystik to It Diabolical Mysticism,"-
\vitchcraft, etc.; a large space to (( Natural Mysticism,"-divin-
ation, lycanthropy, vampires, etc.; and a considerable part
of the (( Divine Mysticism," to various directly miraculous
phenomenalisms. The Abbé Ribet could stiH, in his La
Afystique Divine, distinguée de ses Contrefaçons Diaboliques,
of r895, give us a similarly uncritical mixture and transposi-
tion of tests and levels. But the terrible ravages of the belief
in witchcraft in the later Middle Ages, and, only a few years
back, the humiliating fraud and craze concerning U Diana
Vaughan," are alone abundantly sufficient to warn believers
in the positive character of Evil away from all, solidly
avoiJable, approaches to such dangerous forms of this
belief. 1
(4) Yet the higher and highest Mystical attitude has never
ceased to find its fullest, most penetrating expression in the
life and teaching of devoted children of the Roman Church,-
several of whom have been proclaimed Doctors and Models
by that Church herself. And by a conjunction of four
characteristics these great normative lives and teachers still
point the way, out of and beyond all false or sickly Mysticism,
on to the wholesome and the true.
(i) Thereis, first, the grand trust in and love of God.s beautiful,
wide world, and in and of the manifold truth and goodness
present throughout life,-realities which we have already
found rightly to be dwelt on, in certain recollective movements
and moments, to the momentary exclusion of their positively
operative, yet ever weaker, opposites. U Well I wote," says
Mother Juliana, (( that heaven and earth, and all that is made,
is great, large, fair and good"; H the full-head of joy is to
behold God in all," and U truly to enjoy in Our Lord, is a full
1 Mr. W. R. Inge, in his useful Christian Mysticism, 1899, has some
sharp expressions of disgust against these long-lived survivals within the
Catholic Church. And though his own tone towards Rome in general
belongs also. surely, to a more or less barbaric past. he has done good
service in drawing forcible attention to the matter.
VOL. II. X
3 06 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
lovely thanking in His sight." 1 This completely un- Manichaean
attitude,-so Christian when held as the ultimate among the
divers, sad and joyful, strenuous and contemplative moods of
the soul,-is as strongly present in Clement of Alexandria, in
the Sts. Catherine of Siena and of Genoa, in St. John of the Cross,
and indeed in the recollective moments of all the great Mystics.
(ii) There is, next, a strong insistence upon the soul having
to transcend all particular lights and impressions, in precise
proportion to their apparently extraordinary character, if it
would become strong and truly spiritual. U He that will rely
on the letter of the divine locution, or on the intellectual form
of the vision, will necessarily fall into delusion. (The letter
killeth, the spirit quickeneth '; we must therefore reject the
literal sense, and abide in the obscurity of faith." HOne
desire only doth God allow in His presence, that of perfectly
observing His law and carrying the Cross of Christ. . . . That
soul, which has no other aim, will be a true ark containing the
true l\lanna, which is God." U One act of the will, wrought
in charity, is more precious in the eyes of God, than that
which all the visions and revelations of heaven might effect."
U Let men cease to regard these supernatural apprehensions. . .
that they may be free..' 2 Here the essence of the doctrine lies
in the importance attached to this transcendence, and not in
the particular views of the Saint concerning the character
of this or that miraculous-seeming phenomenon to be
transcended.
(iii) And this essential doctrine retains all its cogency, even
though we hold the strict necessity of a contrary, alternating
movement of definite occupation with the Concrete, Contin-
gent, Historical, Institutional, in thought and action. For this
occupation will be with the normal, typical means, duties, and
facts of human and religious life; and, whilst fully conscious
of the Supernatural working in and with these seemingly but
natural materials, will, with St. Augustine, pray God to
U grant men to perceive in little things the common-seeming
indications of things both small and great," and, with him, will
see a greater miracle in the yearly transformation of the vine's
watery sap into wine, and in the germination of any single
seed, than even in that of Cana. 3
1 Sixteen Revelations. ed. 1902. pp. 23. 84, 101.
2 Ascent of Mount Carmel, tr. Lewis, 1891. pp. 159; 26, 27; 195, 26 5.
I Confessions. Bk. XI. ch. xxiii. I. Tract in Johann. Ev., VIII. I; XXIV.
I: ed. Ben.. Vol. III. 2. colI. 1770 b. 1958 d.
MYSTICISM AND THE QUESTION OF EVIL 307
(iv) And then there is, upon the whole, a tendency to con-
centrate, at these recollective stages, the sours attention upon
Christ and God alone. "I believe I understand," says l\lother
Juliana, " the ministration of holy Angels, as Clerks tell; but
it was not shewed to me. For Himself is nearest and meekest,
highest and lowest, and doeth all. God alone took our nature,
and none but He; Christ alone worked our salvation, and
none but He." 1 And thus we get a wholesome check upon
the Neo-Platonist countless mediations, of which the reflex is
still to be found in the Areopagite. God indeed is alone
held, with all Catholic theologians, to be capable of penetrating
to the sours centre, and the fight against Evil is simplified to
a watch and war against Self, in the form of an ever-increas-
ing engrossment in the thought of God, and in the interests
of His Kingdom. "Only a soul in union with God," says
St. John of the Cross, "is capable of this profound loving
knowledge: for this knowledge is itself that union. . . .
The Devil has no power to simulate anything so great."
" Self-love," says Père Grou, "is the sole source of all the
illusions of the spiritual life. . . . Jesus Christ on one occasion
said to St. Catherine of Siena: 'My daughter, think of Me,
and I will think of thee': a short epitome of all perfection.
, Wheresoever thou findest self,' says the Imitation, 'drop
that self' : the soul's degree of fidelity to this precept is the
true measure of its advancement." 2 The highly authorized
Manuel de Théologie Mystique of the Abbé Lejeune, r897,
gives but one-sixth of its three-hundred pages to the discus..
sion of all quasi-miraculous phenomena, puts them all apart
from the substance of Contemplation and of the Mystical
Life, and dwells much upon the manifold dangers of such,
never essential, things. The French Oratorian, Abbé L.
Laberthonnière, represents, in the A nnales de PhilosoPhie
Chrétienne, a spirituality as full of a delicate Mysticism as
it is free from any attachment to extraordinary phenomena.
The same can be said of the Rev. George Tyrrell's Hard
Sayings and External Religion. And the Abbé Sandreau
has furnished us with two books of the most solid tradition
and discrimination in all these matters. 3
1 Sixteen Revelations, ed. cit. p. 210.
:& J. N. Grou. Méditations sur 1.Amour de Dieu, Nouvelle ed. Perisse.
pp. 268, 271.
a L. Laberthonnière. A nnales de Philosophie Chrétienne. 1905, 1906.
G. Tyrrell, Hard Sayings. 18g8; External Religion. 1902. A. Sandreau.
La Vie d' Union à Dieu. 1900; L' Etat Mystique. 1903.
308 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
(5) And we should, in justice, remember that the Phenomenal-
ist Mysticism, objected to by Prof. Münsterberg and so sternly
transcended by St. John of the Cross, is precisely what is still
hankered after, and treated as of spiritual worth, by present-
day Spiritualism. Indeed, even Prof. James's in many re-
spects valuable Varieties of Religious Experience is seriously
damaged by a cognate tendency to treat Religion, or at least
Mysticism, as an abnormal faculty for perceiving phenomena
inexplicable by physical and psychical science.
(6) And finally, with respect to the personality of Evil, we
must not forget that U there are drawings to evil as to good,
which are not mere self-temptations, . . . but which derive
from other wills than our own; strictly, it is only persons that
can tempt us:' 1
1 M. D. Petre. The Soul's Orbit, 1904. p. 113.
GHAPTER XIV
THE TWO FINAL PROBLEMS: MYSTICISM AND PANTHEISM,
THE IMMANENCE OF GOD, AND SPIRITUAL PERSONALITY,
HUMAN AND DIVINE
INTRODUCTORY.
I mpossibili:y of comPletely abstracting fr011l the theoretical
form in the study of the experimental11
attcr.
We now come to the last two of our final difficulties and
problems-the supposed or real relations between Inclusive or
Exclusive Mysticism and Pantheism; and the question con.
ceming the Immanence of God and Spiritual PersonaJity,
Human and Divine.
(r) A preliminary difficulty in this, our deepest, task arises
from the fact that, whereas the evidences of a predominantly
individual, personal, directly experimental kind, furnished by
every at all deeply religious soul, have hitherto been all but
completely overlooked by trained historical investigators, in
favour of the study of the theological concepts and formu-
lations accepted and transmitted by such souls, now the
opposite extreme is tending to predominate, as in Prof.
William James's Varieties of Religious Experience, r902, or
in Prof. Weinel's interesting study, The Effects of the Spirit
and of the Spirits in the Sub-Apostolic Age, r899. For
here, as Prof. Bousset points out in connection with the
latter book, we get an all but complete overlooking of the
fact that, even in the most individual experience, there is
always some intelIectual framework or conception, some more
or less traditional form, which had previously found lodgment
in, and had been more or less accepted by, that soul; so that,
though the experience itself, where at all deep, is never the
mere precipitate of a conventionally accepted traditional in-
tellectual form, it is nevertheless, even when more or less
in conflict with this form, never completely independ
nt of it.!
I Göttinger Gelehrte Anzeigen, 1901. p. 757.
309
,
3IO THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
- Y et though we cannot discriminate in full detail, we can
show certain peculiarities in the traditional Jewish, Moham-
medan, Christian Mysticism to be not intrinsic to the
Mystical apprehensions as such, but to come from the then
prevalent philosophies which deflected those apprehensions
in those particular ways.
(2) In view then of this inevitable interrelation between the
experimental, personal matter and the theoretical, traditional
form, I shall first consider the Aristotelian and N eo-Platonist
conceptions concerning the relations between the General and
the Particular, between God and Individual Things, as being
the two, partly rival yet largely similar, systems that, between
them, have most profoundly influenced the intellectual starting-
point, analysis, and formulation of those experiences; and
shall try to show the special attraction and danger of these
conceptions for the mystically religious temperament. I shall
next discuss the conceptions as to the reI a tions bet\veen God
and the individual personality,-the Noûs, the Spirit, and the
Soul,-which, still largely Aristotelian and Neo-Platonist,
have even more profoundly commended themselves to those
Mystics, since these conceptions so largely met some of those
Mystics-' requirements, and indeed remain still, in part, the
best analysis procurable. I shall, thirdly, face the question as
to any intrinsic tendency to Pantheism in Mysticism as such,
and as to the significance and the possible utility of any such
tendency, keeping all fuller description of the right check
upon it for my last chapter. And finally, I shall consider
what degree and form of the Divine Immanence in the human
soul, of direct Experience or Knowledge of God on the part
of man, and of U Personality" in God, appear to result from
the most careful analysis of the deepest religious conscious-
ness, and from the requirements of the Sciences and of Life.
I. RELATIONS BETWEEN THE GENERAL AND THE PAR-
TICULAR, GOD AND INDIVIDUAL THINGS, ACCORDING
TO ARISTOTLE, THE NEO-PLATONISTS, AND THE
MEDIEVAL STRICT REALISTS.
I. Aristotle, Plato, Plotinus, Proclus.
(r) With regard to the relations between the General and
Particular, we should note Aristotle's final perplexities and
contradictions, arising from his failure to harmonize or to
MYSTICISM, PANTHEISM, PERSONALITY 311
transcend, by means of a new and self-consistent conception,
the two currents, the Platonic and the specifically Aristotelian,
which make up his thought. For, with him as with Plato, all
Knowledge has to do with Reality: hence Reality alone, in
the highest, primary sense of the word, can form the highest,
primary object of Knowledge; Knowledge will be busy,
primarily, with the Essence, the Substance of things. But
with him, as against Plato, every substance is unique, whence
it would follow that all knowledge refers, at bottom, to the
Individual,-individual beings would form, not only the
starting-point, but also the content and object of knowledge.
- Y et this is what Aristotle, once more at one with Plato,
stoutly denies: Science, even where it penetrates most
deeply into the Particular, is never directed to individual
things as such, but always to General Concepts; and this, not
because of our human incapacity completely to know the
Individual, as such, but because the General, in spite of the
Particular being better known to us, is more primitive and
more knowable, as alone possessing that Immutability which
must characterize all objects of true knowledge. 1 The true
Essence of things consists only in what is thought in their
Concept, which concept is always some Universal; yet this
Universal exists only in Individual Beings, which are thus
declared true Substances: here are two contentions, the
possibility of whose co-existence he fails to explain. Indeed
at one time it is the Form, at another it is the Individual
Being, composed of Form and Matter, which appears as real;
and Matter, again, appears both as the Indefinite General and
as the Cause of Individual Particularity.2
(2) Now Plato had indeed insisted upon ascending to even
greater abstraction, unity, and generality, as the sure process
for attaining to the truth of things; and had retained what is,
for us, a strangely unpersonal, abstract element, precisely in
his highest concept, since God here is hardly personal, but the
Idea of Good, a Substance distinct from all other things, yet
not, on this account, an Individual. Yet Plato's profoundly
aesthetic, social, ethical, above all religious, consciousness
forced him to the inconsistency of proclaiming that, as the
Sun is higher than the light and the eye, so the Good is higher
than (mere) Being and Knowledge; and this Supreme Idea
of the Good gives to things their Being, and to the under-
1 Zeller, PhilosoPhie der Griechen, II. 2, ed. 1879. pp. 309, 312.
:I Ibid. p. 34 8 .
..
312 THE MYSTIGAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
standing its power of Cognition, and is the Cause of all Right-
ness and Beauty, the Source of all Reality and Reason, and
hence, not only a final, but also an efficient Cause,-indeed
the Cause, pure and simple. 1 In the Philebus he tells us
explicitly that the Good and the Divine Reason are identical;
and in the Timaeus the Demiurge, the World-Former, looks
indeed to the Image of the World, in order to copy it: yet
the Demiurge is also himself this image which he copies. 2
We thus still have a supreme
Iultiplicity in Unity as the
characteristic of the deepest Reality; and its chief attribute,
Goodness, is not the most abstract and aloof, but the most
rich in qualities and the most boundlessly self -communicative:
" He was good, so he desired that all things should be as like
unto himself as possible." 3 And Aristotle, (although he places
God altogether outside the visible world, and attributes to
Him there one sole action, the thinking of his own thought,
and one quasi-emotion, intellectual joy at this thinking,) still
maintains, in this shrunken form, the identity of the Good
and of the Supreme Reason, Noûs, and a certain Multiplicity
in Unity, and a true self-consciousness, within Him.
(3) It is Plotinus who is the first expressly to put the God-
head,-in strict obedience to the Abstractive scheme,-beyond
all Multiplicity, hence above the highest Reason itself, for
reason ever contains at least the duality of Subject thinking
and of Object thought; above Being, for all being has ever a
multitude of determinations; and above every part and the
totality of All Things, for it is the cause of them all. The
Cause is here ever outside the effect, the Unity outside the
Multiplicity, what is thought outside of what thinks. The
First is thus purely transcendent,-with one characteristic
exception: although above Being, Energy, Thought, and
Thinking, Beauty, Virtue, Life, It is still the Good; and because
of this, though utterly self-sufficing and without action of any
kind, It, " as it were," overflows, and this overflow produces a
Second. 4 And only this Second is here the Noûs, possessed
of what Aristotle attributes to the First: it is no sheer
1 Republic, VI, 508e; VII, 517b; and Zeller. ibid. II, I. ed. 1889,
pp. 7 0 7-7 10 .
:I Philebus, 22C; Timaeus, 28a, c; 92C (with the reading Õ
E Ò "ÓffP.OS
. . . E:"
JI TOU 7rOt7]TOU).
:I Timaeus, 2ge.
, Enneads, I. vii. I, 61d; I. viii, 2, 72e; VI, viii, 16, end. See, for all
this, Zeller. Philosophie d(3r Griechen. III, ii, ed. 1881. pp. 476-4 80 ; 4 8 3;
5 1 0-4 1 1-
MYSTIGISl\I, PANTHEISM, PERSONALITY 313
Unity, U all things are together there, yet are they there
discriminated " : it is contemplative Thinking of itself; it is
pure and perfect Action. 1
(4) And Proclus who, through the Pseudo-Dionysius, is the
chief mediator between Plato and Plotinus on the one hand,
and the Medieval Mystics and Scholastics on the other, is,
with his immense thirst for Unity, necessarily absorbed by
the question as to the Law according to which all things
are conjoined to a whole. And this Law is for him the
process of the Many out of the One, and their inclination
back to the One; for this process and inclination determine
the connection of all things, and the precise place occupied by
each thing in that connection. All things move in the circle
of procession from their cause, and of return to it; the
simplest beings are the most perfect; the most complex are
the most imperfect. 2
2. The Anti-Proclian current, in the Areopagite's view.
Now in the Pseudo-Dionysius we find an interesting oscilla-
tion between genuine Neo-Platonism, which finds Beings
perfect in proportion to the fewness and universality of their
attributes, although, with it, he inconsistently holds Goodness,
-the deepest but not the most general attribute,-to be the
most perfect of all; and Aristotelianism at its richest, when it
finds Beings perfect according to the multiplicity and depth
of their attributes. Dionysius himself becomes aware of the
dead-lock thence ensuing. "The Divine name of the Good is
extended to things being and to things not being,"-a state-
ment forced upon him by his keeping, with Plato and
Plotinus, Goodness as the supreme attribute, and yet driving
home, more completely than they, their first principle that
Generality and Perfection rise and sink together. "The Name
of Being is extended to all things being" and stretches further
than Life. U The name of Life is extended to all things
living" and stretches further than Wisdom. "The Name of
Wisdom is extended," only, "to all the intellectual, and
rational, and sensible."
But if so, U for what reason do we affirm" (as he has been
doing in the previous sections), " that Life," the less extended,
"is superior to (mere) Being," the more extended? "and
that Wisdom," though less extended, "is superior to mere
Life," the more extended? And he answers in fa vour of
1 Enneads, VIII, ix. 350b; VI, 2317, 6IOd; III. ix. 3. 358a. b.
J Zeller. Ope cit. III. ii. pp. 787-789.
3 1 4 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
depth and richness of attributes. "If anyone assumed the
intellectual to be without being or life, the objection might
hold good. But if the Divine Minds," the Angels, (I both are
above all other beings, and live above all other living creatures,
and think and know above sensible perception and reasoning,
and aspire beyond all other existent and aspiring beings,
to . . . the Beautiful and Good: then they encircle the Good
more closely." For (I the things that participate more in the
one and boundless-giving God, are more. . . divine, than those
that come behind them in gifts." 1 And with abiding truth he
says: "Those who place attributes on That which is above
every attribute, should derive the affirmation from what is
more cognate to It; but those who abstract, with regard to
That which is above every abstraction, should derive the
negation from what is further removed from It. Are not, e. g.
Life and Goodness more cognate to It than air and stone?
And is It not further removed from debauch and anger than
from ineffableness and incomprehensibility? " 2
But more usually Dionysius shows little or no preference for
any particular attribution or denegation; all are taken to fall
short so infinitely as to eliminate any question as to degrees
of failure. U The Deity-Above-All . . . is neither Soul nor
Mind, neither One nor Oneness, neither Deity nor Good-
ness." 3 God is thus purely transcendent.
3. Continuators of the Proclian current.
The influence of the Areopagite was notoriously immense
throughout the Middle Ages,-indeed unchecked,-along its
Proclian, Emanational, Ultra-Unitive current,-among the
Pantheists from the Christian, Mohammedan and Jewish
camps.
(I) Thus Scotus Eriugena (who died in about 877 A.D.)
insists: (I In strict parlance, the Divine Nature Itself exists
alone in all things, and nothing exists which is not that Nature.
The Lord and the Creature are one and the same thing." (I It
is its own Self that the Holy Trinity loves, sees, moves within
us." One of his fundamental ideas is the equivalence of the
degrees of abstraction and those of existence; he simply
hypostatizes the logical table. 4 Eriugena was condemned.
1 Divine Names, ch. v, sec. I: tr. Parker, pp. 73-75.
2 Mystical Theology. ch. iii: Parker, pp. 135, 136.
3 Ibid., ch. iv, sec. 2: Parker, pp. 13 6 , 137.
4 De Divisione Naturae, III, 17; I, 78. Ueberwcg-Heinze. Grundriss
der Geschichte der PhiZosophie, Vol. II. ed. 18 9 8 , p. 159.
MYSTICISM, PANTHEISM, PERSO
ALITY 315
(2) But the Pseudo-Aristotelian, really Proclian, Liber de
Causis, written by a Mohammedan in about 850 A.D., became,
from its translation into Latin in about 1180 A.D. onwards,
an authority among the orthodox Scholastics. I t takes, as " an
example of the (true) doctrine as to Causes, Being, Living-
Being, and Man. Here it is necessary that the thing Being
should exist first of all, and next Living-Being, and last l\Ian.
Living-Being is the proximate, Being is the remote cause of
Man; hence Being is in a higher degree the cause of Man
than is Living-Being, since Being is the cause of Living-
Being, which latter again is the cause of lVlan." . . . Ie Being,
(of the kind) which is before Eternity, is the first cause. . . .
Being is more general than Eternity. . . . Being of the kind
which is with and after Eternity, is the first of created things
. . . It is above Sense, and Soul, and Intelligence." 1
(3) The Mohammedan A vicenna, who died in 1037 A.D., is
mostly Aristotelian in philosophy and Orthodox in religious
intention, and, translated into Latin, was much used by St.
Thomas. Yet he has lapses into pure Pantheism, such as :
" The true Being that belongs to God, is not His only, but is
the Being of all things, and comes forth abundantly from His
Being. That which all things desire is Being: Being is
Goodness; the perfection of Being is the perfection of
Goodness." 2
(4) And the Spanish Jew, Ibn Gebirol (Avicebron), who died
about 1070 A.D., is predominantly Proclian, but with a form
of Pantheism which, in parts, strikingly foreshadows Spinoza.
His masterly Fons Vitae, as translated into Latin, exercised
a profound influence upon Duns Scotus. Ie Below the first
Maker there is nothing but \vhat is both matter and form."
" All things are resolvable into Matter and Form. If all
things were resolvable into a single root," (that is, into
Form alone,) there would be no difference between that one
root and the one Maker." There exists a universal Matter
and a universal Form. The first, or universal Matter, is a
substance existing by itself, which sustains diversity, and is
one in number: it is capable of receiving all the different
kinds of forms. The universal Form is a substance which
constitutes the essence of all the different kinds of forms. . . .
By means of the knowledge of this universal Form, the
1 Sees. 2. 4, ed. Bardenhewer, 1882, pp. 163-166.
2 Commentarius, in Aristolelis MetaPhysica, Tract. VIII, cap. 6, quoted
by Denifle. Archiv f. Litteratur-u-Kirchengeschichte. 1886. p. 520.
.
316 THE l\iYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
knowledge of every (less general) form is acquired,-is
deduced from it and resolved into it." U Being falls under four
categories, answering to: whether it is, what it is, what is its
quality, and why it is: but, of these, the first in order of
dignity is the category which inquires whether it is at all." 1 We
thus get again the degree of worth strictly identical with the
degree of generality.
4. Inconsistencies of Aquinas and Scotus.
(r) St. Thomas, the chief of the orthodox Scholastics, has
embodied the entire Dionysian writings in his own works, but
labours assiduously-and successfully, as far as his own
statements are concerned-to guard against the Pantheistic
tendencies special to strict Realism. Yet it is clear, fron1 his
frequent warnings and difficult distinctions regarding the
double sense of the proposition, " God is sheer Being," and
from the ease with which we find Eckhart, an entirely con-
sistent Realist, lapse into the Pantheistic sense, how
immanent is the danger to any severe form of the system. 2
And he fails to give us a thoroughly understandable and
consistent account as to the relations between the General
and the Particular, between Form and Matter, and between
these two pairs of conceptions. Thus U Materia signata,"
matter, as bearing certain dimensions, U is the principle of
individuation" : 3 yet this quantum is already an individually
determined quantity, and this determination remains unex-
plained. And certain forms exist separately, without matter,
in which case each single form is a separate species; as with
the Angels and, pre-eminently, with God.-Yet, as already
Duns Scotus insisted, Aquinas' general principle seems to
require the non-existence of pure forms as distinct beings,
and the partial materiality of all individual beings. 4
(2) And Duns Scotus teaches, in explicit return to A vicebron,
that every created substance consists of matter as well as of
form, and that there is but one, First Matter, which is identical
in every particular and derivative kind of matter. The world
appears to him as a gigantic tree, whose root is this indeter-
minate matter; whose branches are the transitory substances;
1 Ibn Gebirol, Fons Vitae, ed. Bäumker, 1895: IV. 6, pp. 225, 224;
V, 22, p. 298; II, 20, pp. 60-61; V, 24, p. 301.
3 De Ente et Essentia. c. vi. Summa Theol.. I. quo 3. art. 4 ad I; and
elsewhere.
3 De Ente et Essentia, C. ii.
· See Ueberweg-Heinze. op. cit. pp. 280. 281.
MYSTICISM, PANTHEISM, PERSONALITY 3 1 7
whose leaves the changeable accidents; whose flowers, the
rational souls; whose fruit are the Angels: and which God
has planted and which He tends. Here again the order of
Efficacity,-with the tell-tale exception of God,-is identical
with that of Generality.1
5. Eckhart's Pantheistic trend.
But it is Eckhart who consistently develops the Pantheistic
trend of a rigorous Intellectualism. The very competent
and strongly Thomistic Father Denifle shows how Eckhart
strictly followed the general scholastic doctrine, as enunciated
by A vicenna: U In every creature its Being is one thing, and
is from another, its Essence is another thing, and is not
from another"; whereas in God, Being and Essence are
identical. And Denifle adds: U Eckhart will ha ve been
unable to answer for himself the question as to what, in
strictness, the I Esse' is, in distinction from the I Essentia ' ;
indeed no one could have told him, with precision. . . .
Eckhart lea ves intact the distinction between the Essence
of God and that of the creature; but, doubtless in part
because of this, he feels himself free,-in starting from an
ambiguous text of Boetius,-to break down the careful dis-
criminations established by St. Thomas, in view of this same
text, between Universal Being, Common to all things extant,
and Divine Being, reserved by Aquinas for God alone." 2
U What things are nearer to each other, than anything that
is and Being? There is nothing between them." U Very
Being," the Being of God, U is the actualizing Form of every
form, everywhere." U In one word," adds Denifle, U the Being
of God constitutes the formal Being of all things." 3 The
degrees of Generality and Abstract Thinkableness are again
also the degrees of Reality and Worth: U the Eternal Word
assumed to Itself, not this or that human being, but a human
nature which existed bare, unparticularized." U Being and
Knowableness are identical."
When speaking systematically Eckhart is strictly Plotinian:
U God and Godhead are as distinct as earth is from heaven."
II The Godhead has left all things to God: It owns nought,
wills nought, requires nought, effects nought, produces nought."
U Thou shalt love the Godhead as It truly is: a non-God,
1 De ,.erum PrinciPio, quo viii. Ueberweg-Heinze, Ope cit. pp. 295, 296.
:I H. S. Denifle, Meister Eckhart's Lateinische Schriften. loco cit. pp. 489.
490; 540. n. 6.
I Ibid. p. 519.
318 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
non-Spirit, non-Person . . . a sheer, pure, clear One, severed
from all duality: let us sink down into that One, throughout
eternity, from Nothing unto Nothing, so help us God." "The
Godhead Itself remains unknown to Itself." "It is God who
energizes and speaks one single thing,-His Son, the Holy
Ghost, and all creatures. . . . Where God speaks it, there it
is all God; here, where man understands it, it is God and
creature." 1 No wonder that the following are among the
propositions condemned by Pope John XXII in 1329: "God
produces me as His own Being, a Being identical, not merely
similar"; and, " I speak as falsely when I call God (the God-
head) good, as if I call white, black." 2
6. l'he logical goal of strict Realis1n.
This series of facts, which could be indefinitely extended,
well illustrates the persistence of " the fundamental doctrine
common to all forms of Realism,-of the species as an entity
in the individuals, common to all and identical in each, an
entity to which individual differences adhere as accidents," as
Prof. Pringle Pattison accurately defines thema tter. II Yet when
existence is in question, it is the individual, not the universal,
that is real; and the real individual is not a compound of
species and accidents, but is individual to the inmost fibre
of his being." Not as though Nominalism were in the right.
For" each finite individual has its" special" place in the one
real universe, with all the parts of which it is inseparably
connected. But the universe is itself an individual or real
whole, containing all its parts within itself, and not a universal
of the logical order, containing its exemplifications under it." 3
And, above all, minds, spirits, persons,-however truly they
may approximate more and more to certain great types of
rationality, virtue, and religion, which types are thus increas-
ingly expressive of God's self-revealing purpose and nature,-
are ever, not merely numerically different, as between one
individual and the other, but, both in its potentialities and
especially in its spiritual actualization, no one soul can or
does take the place of any other.
And if we ask what there is in any strict Realism to attract
the Mystical sense, we shall find it, I think, in the insist-
ence of such Realism upon Unity, Universality, and Stability.
1 Meister Eckhart, ed. Pfeiffer, 1857, pp. 158, I; 99, 8; 180, 15; 532,
3 0 ; 3 20 ,27; 288, 26; 20 7. 27.
:I Denzinger, Enchiridion Symbolorum, ed. 1888, Nos. 437, 455.
I Hegelianism and Personality. ed. 1893. pp. 230. 231. and note.
MYSTICISM, PANTHEIS
I, PERSONALITY 319
Yet in so far as Mysticism, in such a case Exclusive
Mysticism, tends to oust the Outgoing movement of the
soul, it empties these forms of their Multiple, Individual,
and Energizing content. Inclusive Mysticism may be truly
said alone to attain to the true Mystic's desires; for only by
the interaction of both movements, and of all the powers of
the soul, will the said soul escape the ever-increasing poverty
of content characteristic of the strict Realist's pyramid of
conceptions; a poverty undoubtedly antagonistic tothe secret
aspiration of Mysticism, which is essentially an apprehension,
admiration, and love of the infinite depths and riches of
Reality-of this Reality no doubt present everywhere, yet in
indefinitely various, and mutually complementary and stimu-
lative forms and degrees. And the readiness with which
Mysticism expressed itself in the Nominalist Categories,-
distinctly less adequate to a healthy, Partial Mysticism than
the more moderate forms of Realism,-shows how little
inti!llsic was the link which seemed to bind it to a Realism
of the most rigorous kind.
II. RELATIONS BETWEEN GOD AND THE HUMAN SOUL.
In taking next the question as to the relations between
God and the Human Soul, we shall find our difficulties
increased, because, here especially, the Philosophers and even
the Biblical \Vriters have, with regard to religious experience,
used expressions and furnished stimulations of a generally
complex and unclarified, intermittent, and unharmonized kind;
and especially because certain specifically religious experiences
and requirements have operated here with a unique intensity,
at one time in a Pantheistic, at another in a more or less
Deistic, direction. The reader will specially note the points
in the following doctrines which helped on the conception
that a certain centre or highest part of the soul is God, or a
part of God, Himself.
I. Plato and Aristotle. "The Noûs."
(I) Plato teaches the pre-existence and the post-existence
(immortality) of the soul, as two interdependent truths. In
his earlier stage, e. g. the Phaedrus, he so little discriminates,
in his argument for immortality, between the individual soul
and the World-Soul, as to argue that "the Self-Moving"
Soul generally" is the beginning of motion, and this motion,"
320 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
(specially here in connection with the human soul,) C( can neither
be destroyed nor begotten, since, in that case, the heavens and
all generation would collapse." Yet individual souls are not,
according to him, emanations of the World-Soul; but, as the
particular ideas stand beside the Supreme Idea, so do the
particular souls stand beside the Soul of the Whole, in a
distinct peculiarity of their own. I-And again, since the soul
has lapsed from a purer, its appropriate, life into the body,
and has thus no original, intrinsic relation to this body, the
activity of the senses, indeed in strictness even that of the
emotions, cannot form part of its essential nature. Only the
highest part of the soul, the Reason, N oûs, which, as " sun-like,
God-like," can apprehend the sun, God, is one and simple, as
are all the ideas, immortal; whereas the soul's lower part
consists of t\VO elements,-the nobler, the irascible, and the
ignobler, the concupiscible passions. But how the unity of
the soul's life can co-exist with this psychical tritomy, is a
question no doubt never formulated even to himself by Plato:
we certainly ha ve only three beings bound together, not one
being active in different directions. 2
(2) Aristotle, if more sober in his general doctrine, brings
some special obscurities and contradictions. For whilst the
pre-existence of the soul, taken as a whole, is formally denied,
and indeed its very origin is linked to that of the body, its
rational part, the N oûs, comes into the physical organism
from outside of the matter altogether, and an impersonal
pre-existence is distinctly predicated of it,-in strict con-
formity with his doctrine that the Supreme Noûs does not
directly act upon, or produce things in, the world. 3
2. St. Paul. The" Spirit."
But it is St. Paul who, in his Mystical outbursts and in the
systematic parts of his doctrine, as against the simply hortatory
level of his teaching, gives us the earliest, one of the deepest,
and to this hour by far the most influential, among the at all
detailed experiences and schemes, accepted by and operative
among Christians, as to the relations of the human soul to
God. And here again, and with characteristic intensity,
1 Phaedrus. 245d; Zeller. op. cit. II. I. ed. 1889. p. 830.
I Ibid. pp. 843. 844; 849. 85 0 .
3 Pre-existence of the Noûs: Gen. Anim.. II. 3. 736b; de Anima. III.
5. 43 0a ; Zeller. op. cit. II. 2. ed. 1879. pp. 593. 595. The Supreme Noûs.
purely transcendent: M etaPh.. XII. 7-10. But see Dr. Edward Caird's
admirable pp. 1-30. VoL II. of his Evolution of Theology in the Greek
Philosophers. 1904.
MYSTICISM, PANTHEISM, PERSONALITY 321
certain overlapping double meanings and conceptions, and
some vivid descriptions of experiences readily suggestive of
the divinity of the soul's highest part, repeatedly appear.
(I) In the systematic passages we not only find the terms
Psyche, " Soul," for the vital force of the body; and N oîts,
(" Mind,") " Heart," and" Conscience," for various aspects
and functions of man's rational and volitional nature: but
a special insistence upon Pneu11za, " Spirit," mostly in a quite
special sense of the word. Thus in I Cor. ii, 14, IS, we get
an absolute contrast between the psychic or sarkic, the simply
natural man, and the Pneumatic, the Spiritual one, all capacity
for understanding the Spirit of God being denied to the for-
mer. The Spiritual thus appears as itself already the Divine,
and the Spirit as the exclusive, characteristic property of God,
something which is foreign to man, apart from his Christian
renovation and elevation to a higher form of existence. Only
with the entrance of faith and its consequences into the mind
and will of man, does this transcendent Spirit become an im-
manent principle: "through His Spirit that dwelleth in you." 1
-Hence, in the more systematic Pauline Anthropology, Pneu-
ma cannot be taken as belonging to man's original endowment.
Certainly in I Gor. ii, II, the tenn " the spirit of a man"
appears simply because the whole passage is dominated by
a comparison between the Divine and the human conscious-
ness, which allows simultaneously of the use of the conversely
incorrect term, " the mind of God,"-here, v. 16, and in Rom.
xi, 34. And the term" the spirit of the world," I Cor. ii. 12,
is used in contrast with" the Spirit of God," and as loosely
as the term " the God of this world," is applied, in 2 Cor.
iv, 4, to Satan.-Only some four passages are difficult to
interpret thus: e.g. "All defilement of flesh and spirit"
(2 Cor. vii, I); for how can God, Spirit, be defiled ? Yet
we can" forget that our body is a temple of the Holy Spirit,"
I Gor. vi, 19; and its defilement can" grieve the Holy Spirit"
(Eph. iv, 30).2
And note how parallel to his conception of this imman-
ence of the transcendent Spirit is St. Paul's conception, based
upon his personal, mystical experience, of the indwelling of
Christ in the regenerate human soul. Saul had indeed been
1 Rom. vill. II. See too Rom. viii. 9. 14; 1 Cor. iii. 16; vi, II; vii,
4 0 ; xii, 3.
I H. J. Holt
mann. Lehrbuch der N. T. Theology. 1897. Vol. II. pp.
12; 15-18.
VOL. II. Y
322 THE
IYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
won to Jesus Christ, not by the history of Jesus' earthly life,
but by the direct manifestation of the heavenly Spirit-Christ,
on the way to Damascus: whence he teaches that only those
who know Him as Spirit, can truly" be in Christ, "-an ex-
pression formed on the model of U to be in the Spirit," as in
Mark xii, 36, and Apoc. i, 10.
(2) And then these tenns take on, in specifically Pauline
Mystical passages, a suggestion of a local extension and
environment, and express, like the corresponding formulae
"in God," "in the Spirit," the conception of an abiding within
as it were an element,-that of the exalted Christ and His
Divine glory. Or Christ is within us, as the Spirit also is
said to be, so that the regenerate personality, by its closeness
of intercourse with the personality of Christ, can become one
single Spirit with Him, I Cor. vi, 17. "As the air is the
element in which man moves, and yet again the element of
life which is present within the man: so the Pneuma-
Christ is for St. Paul both the Ocean of the Divine Being,
into which the Christian, since his reception of the Spirit, is
plunged," and in which he disports himself, " and a strean1
which, derived from that Ocean, is specially introduced within
his individual life." 1 Catherine's profound indebtedness to this
Mystical Pauline doctrine has already been studied; here we
are but considering this doctrine in so far as suggestive, to the
Mystics, of the identity between the true self and God,-an
identity readily reached, if we press such passages as
" Christ, our life"; " to live is Christ" ; U I live, not I, but
Christ liveth in me." 2
3. Plotinus.
Some two centuries later, Plotinus brings his profound
influence to bear in the direction of such identification. For
as the First, the One, which, as we saw, possesses, for him, no
Self-consciousness, Life, or Being, produces the Second, the
Noûs, which, possessed of all these attributes, exercises them
directly in self-contemplation alone; and yet this Second is
so closely like that First as to be " light from light": so does
the Second produce the Third, the Human Psyche, which,
though" a thing by itself," is a " god-like (divine) thing,"
since it possesses" a more divine part, the part which is
neighbour to what is above, the Noûs, with which and from
1 H. J. Holtzmann, Ope cit. Vol. II, pp. 79. 80. Johannes Weiss. Die
Nachfolge Christi, 18 95, p. 95.
I Co!. üi. 4; Phil. i. 2 I; Gal. ii. 20.
MYSTICISM, PANTHEISM, PERSONALITY 323
which Noûs the Psyche exists."-The Psyche is" an image of
the Noûs" : " as outward speech expresses inward thought,
so is the Psyche a concept of the N oûs,-a certain energy of
the Noûs, as the Noûs itself is an energy of the First Cause."
" As with fire, where we distinguish the heat that abides within
the fire and the heat that is emitted by it . . . so must we
conceive the Psyche not as wholly flowing forth from, but as
in part abiding in, in part proceeding from the Noûs." 1
And towards the end of the great Ninth Book of the Sixth
Ennead, he tells how in Ecstasy " the soul sees the Source of
Life . . . the Ground of Goodness, the Root of the Soul. . . .
For we are not cut off from or outside of It. . . but we
breathe and consist in It : since It does not give and then
retire, but ever lifts and bears us, so long as It is what It is."
" We must stand alone in It and must become It alone, after
stripping off all the rest that hangs about us. . . . There we
can behold both Him and our own selves, -oursel ves, full of
Intellectual light, or rather as Pure Light Itself, having become
God, or rather as being simply He . . . abiding altogether
unmoved, having become as it were Stability Itself." U When
man has moved out of himself away to God, like the image
to its Prototype, he has reached his journey's end." "And
this is the life of the Gods and of divine and blessed man . . .
a flight of the alone to the Alone." 2
4. Eckhart's position. Ruysbroek.
(I) Eckhart gives us both Plotinian positions-the God-
likeness and the downright Divinity of the soul. "The Spark
(das Fünkelein) of the Soul. . . is a light impressed upon its
uppermost part, and an image of the Divine Nature, which is
ever at war with all that is not divine. It is not one of the
several powers of the soul. . . . Its name is Synteresis,"-i.e.
conscience. "The nine powers of the soul are all servants of
that man of the soul, and help him on to the soul's Source." 3_
But in one of the condemned propositions he says: " There is
something in the soul which is Increate and Uncreatable; if
the whole soul were such, it would be (entirely) Increate and
Uncreatable. And this is the Intellect,"-standing here
exactly for Plotinus's Noûs. 4
(2) Ruysbroek (who died in 1381) combines a considerable
1 Enneads, V, book I, CC. 3 and 6.
I Ibid. VI, book 9, 9 and I I.
a Eckhart, ed. Pfeiffer, pp. 113, 33; 469, 4 0 , 36.
· Denzinger. op. cit. No. 454-
324 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
fundamental sobriety with much of St. Paul's daring and
many echoes of Plotinus. If The unity of our spirit with God
is of two kinds,-essential and actual. According to its
essence, our spirit receives, in its innermost highest part, the
visit of Christ, without means and without intermission; for
the life which we are in God, in our Eternal Image, and that
which we have and are in ourselves, according to the essence
of our being. . . are without distinction.-But this essential
unity of our spirit with God has no consistency in itself, but
abides in God and flows out from and depends on Him." The
actual unity of our spirit with God, caused by Grace, confers
upon us not His Image, but His Likeness, If and though we
cannot lose the Image of God, nor our natural unity with
Him,-if we lose His Likeness, His Grace, Christ, who, in
this case, comes to us with mediations and intermissions, we
shall be damned." 1
5. St. Teresa's mediating view.
St. Teresa's teachings contain interesting faint echoes of the
old perplexities and daring doctrines concerning the nature of
the Spirit; but articulate a strikingly persistent conviction
that the soul holds God Himself as distinct from His graces,
possessing thus some direct experience of this His presence.
It I cannot understand what the mind is, nor how it differs
from the soul or the spirit either: all three seem to me to be but
one, though the soul sometimes leaps forth out of itself, like a
fire which has become a flame: the flame ascends high above
the fire, but it is still the same flame of the same fire."
H Something subtle and swift seems to issue from the soul, to
ascend to its highest part and to go whither Our Lord will
. . . it seems a flight. This little bird of the spirit seems to
have escaped out of the prison of the body." Indeed CI the
soul is then not in itself . . . it seems to me to have its dwelling
higher than even the highest part of itself." 2_" In the begin-
ning I did not know that God is present in all things. . . .
Unlearned men used to tell me that He was present only by
His grace. I could not believe that . . . A most learned
Dominican told me He was present Himself. . . this was a
great comfort to me." "To look upon Our Lord as being in
the innermost parts of the soul. . . is a much more profit-
able method, than that of looking upon Him as external to
1 Vier Schriften von Johannes Ruysbroek. ed. Ullmann, 1848. pp. 106,
10 7.
I Life, written by Herself, tr. D. Lewis. ed. 1888, pp. 124. 421. 146.
MYSTICISM, PANTHEISM, PERSONALITY 325
us." "ThelivingGodwasinmysouI." And even, "hitherto"
up to 1555, " my life was my own; my life, since then, is the
life which God lived in me." 1
6. I mmanence, not Pantheism.
St. Teresa's teaching as to God's own presence in the soul
points plainly, I think, to the truth insisted on by the Catholic
theologian Schwab, in his admirable monograph on Gerson.
" Neither speculation nor feeling are satisfied with a Pure
Transcendence of God; and hence the whole effort of true
Mysticism is directed, whilst not abolishing His Transcend...
ence, to embrace and experience God, His living presence,
in the innermost soul,-that is, to insist, in some way or other,
upon the Immanence of God. Reject all such endeavours as
Pantheistic, insist sharply upon the specific eternal difference
between God and the Greature : and the Speculative, Mystical
depths fade away, with all their fascination." 2 Not in finding
Pantheism already here, with the imminent risk of falling into
a cold Deism, but in a rigorous insistence, with all the great
Inclusive Mystics, upon the spiritual and moral effects, as the
tests of the reality and worth of such experiences, and, with
the Ascetical and Historical souls, upon also the other move...
ment-an outgoing in some kind of contact with, and labour
at, the contingencies and particularities of life and mind-wil]
the true safeguard for this element of the soul's life be found. 3
III. MYSTICISM AND PANTHEISM: THEIR DIFFERENCES
AND POINTS OF LIKENESS.
But does not Mysticism, not only find God in the soul, but
the soul to be God? Is it not, as such, already Pantheism?
Or, if not, what is their difference?
I. Plotinus and Spinoza compared.
Now Dr. Edward Caird, in his fine book, The Evoluti01J
of Theology in the Greek PhilosoPhers, 1904, tells us that
"
I ysticism is religion in its most concentrated and exclusive
form; it is that attitude of mind in which all other relations
1 Life, written by Herself, tr. D. Lewis, ed. 1888, pp. 355, 130. 43 0 ; 114.
I J. B. Schwab, Johannes Gerson, 1858, pp. 361. 362.
8 I can find but one, secondary Ecclesiastical Censure of the doctrine of
God's substantial presence in the soul.-the censure passed by the Paris
Sorbonne on Peter Lombard. The same Socbonne repeatedly censured
St. Thomas on other points.
326 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
are swallowed up in the relation of the soul to God"; and
that" Plotinus is the Mystic par excellence." 1 And he then
proceeds to contrast Plotinus, the typical 1\1 ystic, with Spinoza,
the true Pantheist.
" Whether" or not" Spinoza, in his negation of the limits
of the finite, still leaves it open to himself to admit a reality
in finite things which is not negated," and" to conceive of the
absolute substance as manifesting itself in attributes and
modes" : "it is very clear that he does so conceive it, and
that, for all those finite things which he treats as negative
and illusory in themselves, he finds in God a ground of reality
. . . which can be as little destroyed as the divine substance
itself." "God, Deus sive N atufa, is conceived as the im-
manent principle of the universe, or perhaps rather the
universe is conceived as immanent in God."-Thus to him
" the movement by which he dissolves the finite in the infinite,
and the movement by which he finds the finite again in the
infinite, are equally essential. If for him the world is nothing
apart from God, God is nothing apart from His realization in
the world." This is true Pantheism. 2
But in Plotinus the via negativa involves a negation of the
finite and determinate in all its forms; hence here it is im-
possible to find the finite again in the infinite. The Absolute
One is here not immanent but transcendent. 3 "While the
lower always has need of the higher, the higher is regarded as
having no need " for any purpose " of the lower " ; and " the
Highest has no need of anything but Itself." "Such a pro-
cess cannot be reversed": "in ascending, Plotinus has drawn
the ladder after him, and left himself no possibility of descend-
ing again. The movement, in which he is guided by definite
and explicit thought, is always upwards; while, in describing
the movement downwards, he has to take refuge in metaphors
and analogies," for the purpose of indicating a purely self-
occupied activity which only accidentally produces an external
effect, e.g. "the One as it were overflows, and produces another
than itself." 4 "Thus we have the strange paradox that the
Being who is absolute, is yet conceived as in a sense external to
the relative and finite, and that He leaves the relative and finite
in a kind of unreal independence." "On the one side, we have a
1 Vol. II, pp. 210, 211.
I Ibid. pp. 230, 23 1 .
a Ibid. p. 231.
· Ibid. pp. 253-257. Enneads. V. book ii, I.
MYSTICISl\1, PANTHEISM, PERSONALITY 327
life which is nothing apart from God, and which, nevertheless,
can never be united to him, except as it loses .itself alto-
gether; and, on the other side, an Absolute, which yet is not
immanent in the life it originates, but abides in transcendent
isolation from it. . . . It is this contradiction which . . .
makes the writings of Plotinus the supreme expression of
l\Iysticism." 1
Now I think, with this admirable critic, that we cannot but
take Spinoza as the classical representative of that parallel-
istic Pantheism to which most of our contemporary systems of
psycho-physical parallelism belong. As Prof. Troeltsch well
puts it, " we have here a complete parallelism between every
single event in the physical world, which event is already en-
tirely explicable from its own antecedents within that physical
world, and every event of a psychical kind, which, neverthe-
less, is itself also entirely explicable from its own psychical
antecedents alone." And" this parallelism again is but two
sides of the one World-Substance, Which is neither Nature
nor Spirit, and Whose law is neither natural nor spiritual law,
bu t Which is Being in general and Law in general." In this
one World-Substance, with its parallel self-manifestations as
extension and as thought, Spinoza finds the ultimate truth
of Religion, as against the Indeterminist, Anthropomorphic
elements of all the popular religions,-errors which have
sprung, the Anthropomorphic from man's natural inclination
to interpret Ultimate Reality, with its complete neutrality
towards the distinctions of Psychical and Physical, by the
Psychic side, as the one nearest to our own selves; and the
Indeterminist from the attribution of that indetermination to
the World-Substance which, even in Psychology, is already
a simple illusion and analytical blunder.
" It is in the combination," concludes Professor Troeltsch,
"of such a recognition of the strict determination of all
natural causation, and of such a rejection of materialism
(with its denial of the independence of the psychic world), that
rests the immense power of Pantheism at the present time." 2
On the other hand, the supposed Pantheistic positions of the
later Lessing, of Herder, Goethe and many another pre-
dominantly aesthetic thinker, must, although far richer and
more nearly adequate conceptions of full reality, be assigned,
1 Vol. II. pp. 232, 233.
I .. Religions-philosophie," in Die Philosoþhie im Beginn des zwan-
zigsten ]ahrhunderts. 1904, Vol. I. pp. 115. 117.
328 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
qua Pantheism, a secondary place, as inconsistent, because
already largely Teleological, indeed Theistic Philosophies.
2. ComPlete Pantheism non-religious; why approached by
Mysticism.
Now the former, the full Pantheism, must, I think, be
declared, with Rauwenhoff, to be only in name a religious
position at all. "In its essence it is simply a complete
Monism, a recognition of the Pan in its unity and indivisibility,
and hence a simple view of the world, not a religious concep-
tion." L- Y et deeply religious souls can be more or less, indeed
profoundly, influenced by such a Monism, so that we can get
Mystics with an outlook considerably more Spinozist than
Plotinian. There can, e.g., be no doubt as to both the deeply
religious temper and the strongly Pantheistic conceptions of
Eckhart in the Middle Ages, and of Schleiermacher in modem
times; and indeed Spinoza himself is, apart from all questions
as to the logical implications and results of his intellectual
system, and as to the justice of his attacks upon the historical
religions, a soul of massive religious intuition and aspiration.
But further: Mystically tempered souls,-and the typical
and complete religious soul win ever possess a mystical
element in its composition,-have three special attraits which
necessarily bring them into an at least apparent proximity to
Pantheism.
(r) For one thing Mysticism, like Pantheism, has a great,
indeed (if left unchecked by the out-going-movernent) an
excessive, thirst for Unity, for a Unity less and less possessed
of Mu tiplicity; and the transition from holding the Pure
Transcendence of this Unity to a conviction of its Ex-
clusive Immanence becomes easy and insignificant, in pro-
portion to the emptiness of con ten t increasingly characterizing
this Oneness.
(2) Then again, like Pantheists, Mystics dwell much upon
the strict call to abandon all self-centredness, upon the death
to self, the loss of self; and in proportion as they dwell upon
this self to be thus rejected, and as they enlarge the range of
this petty self, do they approach each other more and more.
(3) And lastly, there is a peculiarity about the Mystical habit
of mind, which inevitably approximates it to the Pantheistic
mode of thought, and which, if not continuously taken by the
Mystic soul itself as an inevitable, but most demonstrable, in-
1 Religions-philosophie. Germ. tr.. ed. 18941 p. 140.
MYSTICIS
I, PANTHEIS
I, PERSONALITY 329
adequacy, will react upon the substance of this soul's thought
in a truly Pantheistic sense. This peculiarity results from the
Mystic's ever-present double tendency of absorbing himself,
away from the Successive and Temporal, in the Simultaneity
and Eternity of God, conceiving thus all reality as partaking,
in proportion to its depth and greater likeness to Him, in
this Totunt Simul character of its ultimate Author and End;
and of clinging to such vivid picturings of this reality as are
within his, this
Iystic's reach. Now such a Simultaneity
can be pictorially represented to the mind only by the Spatial
imagery of co-existent Extensions,-say of air, water, light,
or fire: and these representations, if dwelt on as at all
adequate, will necessarily suggest a Determinism of a
Mathematico-Physical, Extensional type, i. e. one, and the
dominant, side of Spinozistic Pantheism.-It is here, I think,
that we get the double cause for the Pantheistic-seeming
trend of almost all the
1 ystical imagery. For even the
marked Emanationism of much in Plotinus, and of still more
in Proclus,-the latter still showing through many a phrase
in Dionysius,-appears in their images as operating upon a
fixed Extensional foundation: and indeed these very over-
flowings, owing to the self-centredness and emptiness of
content of their Source, the One, and to their accidental yet
automatic character, help still further to give to the whole
outlook a strikingly materialistic, mechanical, in so far
Pantheistic, character.
3. Points on which Mysticism has usefully approxi11lated to
Pantheism.
And yet we must not overlook the profound, irreplaceable
services that are rendered by Mysticism,-provided always it
remains but one of two great movements of the living soul,-
even on the points in which it thus approximates to Pantheism.
These services, I think, are three.
(1) The first of these services has been interestingly illus-
trated by Prof. A. S. Pringle Pattison, from the case of Dr.
J ames
lartineau's writings, and the largely unmediated co-
existence there of two different modes of conceiving God.
It The first mode represents God simply as another, higher
Person; the second represents Him as the soul of souls.
The former, Deistic and Hebraic, rests upon an inferential
knowledge of God, derived either from the experience of His
resistance to our will through the forces of Nature, or from
that of His restraint upon us in the voice of Conscience,-
330 THE
IYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
God, in both cases, being regarded as completely separated
from the human soul, and His existence and character appre...
hended and demonstrated by a process of reasoning.-The
second mode is distinctly and intensely Christian, and con-
sists in the apprehension of God as the Infipite including all
finite existences, as the immanent Absolute who progressively
manifests His character in the Ideals of Truth, Beauty,
Righteousness, and Love." And Professor Pattison points
out, with Professor Upton, that it was Dr.
lartineau's almost
morbid dread of Pantheism which was responsible for the
inadequate expression given to this Mystical, or {{ Speculative"
element in his religious philosophy. For only if we do not
resist such Mysticism, do we gain and retain a vivid experience
of how {{ Consciousness of imperfection and the pursuit of
perfection are alike possible to man only through the
universal life of thought and goodness in which he shares,
and which, at once an indwelling presence and an unattain-
able ideal, draws him on and always on." {{ Personality is "
thus {{ not { unitary' in
lartineau's sense, as occupying one
side of a relation, and unable to be also on the other. The
very capacity of knowledge and morality implies that the
person . . . is capable of regarding himself and all other beings
from what Martineau well names { the station of the Father
of Spirits.' " 1
. I would, however, guard here against any exclusion of a
seeking or finding of God in Nature and in Conscience: only
the contrary exclusion of the finding of God within the soul,
and the insistence upon a complete separation of Him from
that soul, are inacceptable in the {{ Hebraic" mood. For a
coming and a going, a movement inwards and outwards,
checks and counter-checks, friction, contrast, battle and storm,
are necessary conditions and ingredients of the soul's growth
in its sense of appurtenance to Spirit and to Peace.
(2) A further service rendered by this Pan theistic-seeming
Mysticism,-though always only so long as it remains not
the only or last word of Religion,-is that it alone discovers
the truly spiritual function and fruitfulness of Deterministic
Science. For only if
lan deeply requires a profound de-
subjectivizing, a great shifting of the centre of his interest,
away from the petty, claimful, animal self, with its {{ I against
all the world," to a great kingdom of souls, in which Man
1 " Martineau.s Philosophy:. Hibbert Journal, Vol. I, 1902. pp. 45 8 , 457.
MYSTICISM, PANTHEISM, PERSONALITY 33I
gains his larger, spiritual, unique personality, with its U I as
part of, and for all the world," by accepting to be but one
amongst thousands of similar constituents in a system
expressive of the thoughts of God; and only if Mathematico-
Physical Science is specially fitted to provide such a bath,
and hence is so taken, with all its apparently ruinous
Determinism and seeming Godlessness: is such Science
really safe from apologetic emasculation; or from running, a
mere unrelated dilettantism, alongside of the deepest interests
of the soul; or from, in its turn, crushing or at least
hampering the deepest, the spiritual life of man. Hence all the
greater Partial
lystics have got a something about them
which indicates that they have indeed passed through fire
and water, that their poor selfishness has been purified in a
bath of painfully-bracing spiritual air and light, through which
they have emerged into a larger, fuller life. And Nicolas of
Coes, Pascal, Malebranche are but three men out of many
whose Mysticism and whose Mathematico-Physical Science
thus interstimulated each other and jointly deepened their
souls.
We shall find, further on, that this purificatory power of
such Science has been distinctly heightened for us now. Yet,
both then and now, there could and can be such purification
only for those who realize and practise religion as sufficiently
ultimate and wide and deep to englobe, (as one of religion's
necessary stimulants), an unweakened, utterly alien-seeming
Determinism in the middle regions of the soul's experience
and outlook. Such an englobement can most justly be
declared to be Christianity driven fully home. For thus is
Man purified and saved,-if he already possesses the domi-
nant religious motive and conviction,-by a close contact
\vith Matter; and the Cross is plunged into the very centre
of his soul's life, operating there a sure division between
the perishing animal Individual and the abiding spiritual
Personality: the deathless Incarnational and Redemptive
religion becomes thus truly operative there.
(3) And the last service, rendered by such Mysticism, is to
keep alive in the soul the profoundly important consciousness
of the prerequisites, elements and affinities of a Universally
Human kind, which are necessary to, and present in, all
Religion, however definitely Concrete, Historical and Institu-
tional it may have become. Such special, characteristic
Revelations, Doctrines and Institutions, as we find them in
.
332 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
all the great Historical Religions, and in their full normative
substance and form in Christianity and Catholicism, can
indeed alone completely develop, preserve and spread
Religion in its depth and truth; yet they ever presuppose
a general, usually dim but most real, religious sense and
experience, indeed a real presence and operation of the
Infinite and of God in all men.
It is, then, not an indifferentist blindness to the profound
differences, in their degree of truth, between the religions of
the world, nor an insufficient realization of man's strict need of
historical and institutional lights and aids for the development
and direction of that general religious sense and experience,
which make the mind revolt from sayings such as those we
have already quoted from the strongly Protestant Prof.
Wilhelm Hermann, and to which we can add the following.
U Everywhere, outside of Christianity, Mysticism will arise,
as the very flower of the religious development. But the
Christian must declare such Mystical experience of God to be
a delusion." For U what is truly Christian is iPso facto not
Mystical." cc We are Christians because, in the Humanity of
Jesus, we have struck upon a fact which is of incomparably
richer content, than are the feelings that arise within our own
selves." Indeed, U I should have failed to recognize the hand
of God even in what my o\vn dead father did for me, had not,
by means of my Christian education, God appeared to me, in
the Historic Christ." L-As if it were possible to consider
Plato and Plotinus, in those religious intuitions and feelings
of theirs which helped to win an Augustine from crass
Manichaeism to a deep Spiritualism, and which continue to
breathe and bum as part-elements in countless sayings of
Christian philosophers and saints, to ha ve been simply
deluded, or mere idle subjectivists! As if we could apprehend
even Christ, without some most real, however dim and
general, sense of religion and presence of God within us to
which He could appeal! And as if Jeremiah, Ezekiel and
the Maccabaean Martyrs, and many a devoted soul within
Mohammedanism or in Brahmanic India, could not and did
not apprehend something of God's providence in their earthly
father's love towards them!
No wonder that, after all this, Hermann can,-as against
Richard Rothe who, in spite of more than one fantastic if not
1 Der Verkehr des Christen mit Gott. ed. 1892. pp. 27, 15. 28. 231.
MYSTIGISM, PANTHEISM, PERSONALITY 333
fanatical aberration, had, on some of the deepest religious
matters, a rarely penetrating perception,-writeina thoroughly
patronizing manner concerning Catholic Mysticism. For this
Mysticism necessarily appears to him not as, at its best, the
most massive and profound development of one type of the
ultimate religion,-a type in which one necessary element of
all balanced religious life is at the fullest expansion compatible
with a still sufficient amount and healthiness of the other
necessary elements of such a life,-but only as Ie a form of
religion which has brought out and rendered visible such a
content of interior life as is capable of being produced within
the limits of Catholic piety." 1 The true, pure Protestant
possesses, according to Hermann, apparently much less, in
reality much more,-the Gategorical Imperative of Conscience
and the Jesus of History, as the double one-and-all of his, the
only spiritual religion.- Y et if Christianity is indeed the
religion of the Divine Founder, Who declared that he that is
not against Him is for Him; or of Paul, who could appeal to
the heathen Athenians and to all men for the truth and
experience that in God Ie we live and move and have our
being"; or of the great Fourth Gospel, which tells us that
Christ, the True Light, enlighteneth every man that cometh
into the world, a light which to this hour cannot, for the great
majority, be through historic knowledge of the Historic Christ
at all; or of Clement of Alexandria and of Justin Martyr,
who loved to find deep apprehensions and operations of God
scattered about among the Heathen; or of Aquinas, who, in
the wake of the Areopagite and others, so warmly dwells
upon how Grace does not destroy, but presupposes and
perfects Nature: then such an exclusive amalgam of
Moralism and History, though doubtless a most honest and
intelligible reaction against opposite excesses, is a sad
impoverishment of Christianity, in its essential, world-wide,
Catholic character. .
Indeed, to be fair, there have never been wanting richer and
more balanced Protestant thinkers strongly to emphasize
this profound many-sidedness and universality of Christian-
ity: so, at present, in Germany, Profs. Eucken, Troeltsch,
Glass, Siebeck and others; and, in England, Prof. A. S. P.
Pattison and Mr. J. R. Illingworth. In all these cases there is
ever a strong sympathy with Mysticism properly understood
1 Del' Verkehr des Christen mit Gott. cd. 1892. pp. 20; 19-25.
,
334 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
as the surest safeguard against such distressing contractions
as is this of Herniann, and that of Albrecht Ritschl before
him.
4. Christianity excludes comPlete and final Pantheis1n.
And yet, as we have repeatedly found, Christianity has, in
its fundamental Revelation and Experience, ever implied and
affirmed such a conception of Unity, of Self-Surrender, and of
the Divine Action, as to render any Pantheistic interpretation
of these things ever incomplete and transitional.
(1) The Unity here is nowhere, even ultimately, the sheer
Oneness of a simply identical Substance, but a Unity deriving
its very close-knitness from its perfect organization of not
simply identical elements or relations.
The Self-Surrender here is not a simply final resolution, of
laboriously constituted centres of human spiritual consciousness
and personality, back into a morally indifferent All, but a
means and passage, for the soul, from a spiritually worthless
self-entrenchment within a merely psycho-physical apartness
and lust to live, on to a spiritual devotedness, an incorporation..
as one necessary subject, into the Kingdom of souls,-the
abiding, living expression of the abiding, living God.
And, above all, God's Action is not a mechanico-physical,
detenninist, simultaneous Extension, nor even an automatic,
accidental, unconscious Emanation, but, as already Plato
divined,-an intuition lost again by Aristotle, and, in his logic,
denied by Plotinus,-a voluntary outgoing and self-communi-
cation of the supreme self-conscious Spirit, God. For Plato
tells us that " the reason why Nature and this Universe of
things was framed by Him Who framed it, is that God is
good . . . and desired that all things should be as like
Himself as it was possible for them to be." 1 Yet this
pregnant apprehension never attains here to its full signifi-
cance, because the Divine Intelligence is conceived only as
manifesting itself in relation to something given from without,
-the pre-existing, chaotic Matter. And for Aristotle God
does not love this Gi venness; for (( the first Mover moves" (all
things) only "as desired" by them: He Himself desires,
loves, wills nothing whatsoever, and thinks and knows
nothing but His own self alone. 2 And in Plotinus this same
transcendence is still further emphasized, for the Absolute
One here transcends even an thought and self-consciousness.
1 Timaeus, 2ge, seq.
I IVletaþh., VII, 1072b; IX, 1074 b .
l\fYSTICISM, PANTHEISM, PERSONALITY 335
(2) It is in Christianity, after noble preludings in Judaism,
that we get the full deliberate proclamation, in the great Life
and Teaching, of the profound fact,-the Self-Manifestation
of the Loving God, the Spirit-God moving out to the spirit-
man, and spirit-man only thus capable of a return movement
to the Spirit-God. As Schelling said, II God can only give
Himself to His creatures as He gives a self to them," and,
with it, the capacity of participating in His life. We thus get
a relation begun and rendered possible by God's utterly
prevenient, pure, ecstatic love of Man, a relation which, in its
essence spiritual, personal and libertarian, leaves behind it, as
but vain travesties of such ultimate Realities, all Emanational
or Parallelistic Pantheism, useful though these latter systems
are as symbols of the 1\1:athematico-Physicallevel and kind of
reality and apprehension. Yet this spiritual relation is here,
unlike Plotinus's more or less Emanational conception of it,
not indeed simply invertible, as Spinoza would have it, (for
Man is ontologically dependent upon God, whereas God is
not thus dependent upon Man), but nevertheless largely one
of true mutuality. And this mutuality of the relation is not
simply a positive enactment of God, but is expressive, in its
degree and mode, of God's intrinsic moral nature. For God
is here the Source as well as the Obj ect of all love; hence
He Himself possesses the supreme equivalent for this our
noblest emotion, and is moved to free acts of outgoing, in
the creation and preservation, the revelation to, and the
redemption of finite spirits, as so many sucessive, mutually
supplementary, and increasingly fuller expressions and objects
of this His nature. U God is Love"; {( God so loved the
world, that He gave His only-begotten Son"; It Let us love
God, for God hath first loved us " ; {( if any man will do the
will of God, he shall know of the doctrine if it be from God " :
God's Infinity is here, not the negation of the relatively inde-
pendent life of His creatures, but the very reason and source
of their freedom. 1
In the concluding chapter I hope to give a sketch of the
actual operation of the true correctives to any excessive,
Plotinian or Spinozistic, tendencies in the
1 ystical trend,
especially when utilizing Mathematico-Physical Science at
the soul's middle level; and of History at the ultimate
reaches of the soul's life.
1 See Caird. Ope cit. II, p. 337.
.
-
336 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
IV. THE DIVINE IMMANENCE; SPIRITUAL PERSONALITY
I. Pantheis1n.
As to our fourth question, the Divine Immanence and
Personality, our last quotations from St. Teresa give us, I
think, our true starting-point. For it is evident that, between
affirming the simple Divinity of the innermost centre of the
soul, and declaring that the soul ever experiences only the
Grace of God, i. e. certain created effects, sent by Him from
the far-away seat of His own full presence, there is room for
a middle position which, whilst ever holding the definite
creatureliness of the soul, in all its reaches, puts God Himself
into the soul and the soul into God, in degrees and with
results which vary indeed indefinitely according to its good-
will and its call, yet which all involve and constitute a presence
ever profoundly real, ever operative before and beyond aU
the soul's own operations. These latter operations are, indeed,
even possible only through all this Divine anticipation, origin-
ation, preservation, stimulation, and, at bottom,-in so far as
man is enabled and required by God to reach a certain real
self-constitution,-through a mysterious Self-Limitation of
God's own Action,-a Divine Self-Restraint.
There can be little doubt that such a Panentheism is all
that many a daring, in strictness Pantheistic, saying of the
Christian, perhaps also of the Jewish and Mohammedan,
Mystics aimed at. Only the soul's ineradicable capacity,
need and desire for its Divine Lodger and Sustainer would
constitute, in this conception, the intrinsic characteristic of
human nature; and it is rather the too close identification,
in feeling and emotional expression, of the desire and the
Desired, of the hunger and the Food, and the too exclusive
realization of the deep truth that this desire and hunger do
not cause, but are themselves preceded and caused by, their
Object,-it is the over-vivid perception of this real dynamism,
rather than any a priori theory of static substances and
identities-which, certainly in many cases, has produced the
appearance of Pantheism.
And again it is certain that we have to beware of taking
the apparent irruption or ingrafting,-in the case of the
operations of Grace,-of an entirely heterogeneous Force
and Reality into what seems the already completely closed
circle of our natural functions and aspirations, as the complete
and ultimate truth of the situation. However utterly different
MYSTICISM, PANTHEISM, PERSONALITY 337
that Force may feel to all else that we are aware of within
ourselves, however entirely unmeditated may seem its mani-
festations: it is clear that we should be unable to recognize
even this Its difference, to welcome or resist It, above all to
find It a response to our deepest cravings, unless we had
some natural true affinity to It, and some dim but most real
experience of It from the first. Only with such a general
religiosity and vague sense, from a certain contact, of the
Infinite, is the recognition of definite, historical Religious
Facts and Figures as true, significant, binding upon my will
and conscience, explicable at all.
z. Aquinas on our direct sen'lÏ-consciousness of God's in-
dwelling.
St. Thomas, along one line of doctrine, has some excellent
teachings about all this group of questions. For though he
tens us that H the names which we give to God and creatures,
are predicated of God" only U according to a certain relation
of the creature to God, as its Principle and Cause, in which
latter the perfections of aU things pre-exist in an excellent
manner" : 1 yet he explicitly admits, in one place, that we
necessarily have some real, immediate experience of the
Nature of God, for that U it is impossible, with regard to
anything, to know whether it exists, "-and he has admitted
that natural reason can attain to a knowledge of God's bare
existence,-u unless we somehow know what is its nature,"
at least U with a confused knowledge"; whence II also with
regard to God, we could not know whether He exists" unless
we somehow know, even though confusedly, what He is."-
God, though transcendent, is also truly immanent in the
human soul: "God is in all things, as the agent is pres en t
in that wherein it acts. Created Being is as true an effect of
God's Being, as to burn is the true effect of fire. God is
above all things,-by the excellence of His nature, and yet
He is intimately present within all things, as the cause of the
Being of all."-And man has a natural exigency of the face-
to-face Vision of God, hence of the Order of Grace, however
entirely its attainment may be beyond his natural powers:
II There is in man a natural longing to know the cause, when
he sees an effect: whence if the intellect of the rational
1 Summa Theol.. I, quo 13. art. 5. condo et in corp. (See the inter-
esting note. "The Meaning of Analogy," in Fr. Tyrrell's Le
Orandi.
1903, pp. 80-83.) In Librum Boetii de Trinitate: D. Thomae Aquinatis
Opera, ed. Veneta Altera. 1776. p. 34Ib, 342a.
VOL. II. Z
.
33 8 THE IVIYSTICAL ELE
IENT OF RELIGION
creature could not attain to the First Cause of things," -here
in the highest form, that of the Beatific vision of God- U the
longing of its nature would remain void and vain." 1
But it is the great Mystical Saints and writers who con-
tinuously have, in the very forefront of their consciousness
and assumptions, not a simply moral and aspirational, but
an Ontological and Pre-established relation between the soul
and God; and not a simply discursive apprehension, but a
direct though dim Experience of the Infinite and of God.
And these positions really underlie even their most complete-
seeming negations, as we have already seen in the case of the
Areopagite.
3. Gradual recognition of the function of subconsciousness.
Indeed, we can safely affirm that the last four centuries, and
even the last four decades, have more and more confirmed the
reality and indirect demonstrableness of such a presence and
sense of the Infinite; ever more or less obscurely, but none
the less profoundly, operative in the innermost normal con-
sciousness of mankind: a presence and sense which, though
they can be starved and verbally denied, cannot be com-
pletely suppressed; and which, though they do not, if un-
endorsed, constitute even the most elementary faith, far less
a developed Historical or 1\Iystical Religion, are simply
necessary prerequisites to all these latter stimulations and
consolida tions.
(I) As we have already found, it is only since Leibniz that
we know, systematically, how great is the range of everyman's
Obscure Presentations, his dim Experience as against his
Clear or distinct Presentations, his explicit Knowledge; and
how the Clear depends even more upon the Dim, than the
Dim upon the Clear. And further discoveries and proofs in
this direction are no older than 1888. 2
(2) Again, it is the growing experience of the difficulties
and complexities of Psychology, History, Epistemology, and
of the apparent unescapableness and yet pain of man's mere
anthropomorphisms, that makes the persistence of his search
for, and sense of, Objective Truth and Reality, and the keen-
1 Summa Theol., I, quo 12, art. I, in corp.
2 For Leibniz, see especially his Nouveaux Essais, written in 1701-1709,
but not published till 1765: Die Philosoþhischen Schriften von G. IV.
Leibniz, ed. Gebhardt, Vol. V, 1882, especially pp. 45; 67; 69; 121,122.
For the date 1888, see W. James's Varieties of Religious Experience, 1902.
p. 233.
MYSTICISM, PANTHEISM, PERSONALITY 339
ness of his suffering when he appears to himself as imprisoned
in mere subjectivity, deeply impressive. For the more man
feels, and suffers from feeling himself purely subjective, the
more is it clear that he is not merely subjective: he could
never be conscious of the fact, if he were. U Suppose that all
your objects in life were realized . . . would this be a great
joy and happiness to you? " John Stuart Mill asked himself;
and U an irrepressible self-consciousness distinctly answered
( No.' "1 Whether in bad health just then or not, Mill was
here touching the very depths of the characteristically human
sense. In an such cases only a certain profound apprehension
of Abiding Reality, the Infinite, adequately explains the keen,
operative sense of contrast and disappointment.
(3) And further, we have before us, with a fulness and
delicate discrimination undreamed of in other ages, the
immense variety, within a certain general psychological
unity, of the great and small Historical Religions, past and
present, of the world. Facing all this mass of evidence,
Prof. Troeltsch can ask, more confidently than ever: U Are
not our religious requirements, requirements of Something
that one must have somehow first experienced in order
to require It? Are they not founded upon some kind of
Experience as to the Object, Which Itself first awakens the
thought of an ultimate infinite meaning attaching to exist-
ence, and Which, in the conflict with selfishness, sensu-
ality and self-will, draws the nobler part of the human will,
with ever new force, to Itself?" U All deep and energetic
religion is in a certain state of tension to\vards Culture, for
the simple reason that it is seeking something else and some-
thing higher." 2 And Prof. G. P. Tiele, so massively learned in
all the great religions, concludes: U ( Religion,' says Feuerbach,
( proceeds from man's wishes' . . . ; according to others, it is
the outcome of man's dissatisfaction with the external world.
. . . But why should man torment himself \vith wishes
which he never sees fulfilled around him, and which the
rationalistic philosopher declares to be illusions? Why?
surely, because he cannot help it. . . . The Infinite, very
Being as opposed to continual. becominþ"
nd per
shin
,-
or call It what you will,-that IS the Prl1
cII?le
ThI
gIves
him constant unrest because It dwells wIthIn hun. And
,
1 Autobiography, ed. 1875, pp. 133. 134.
I II Die Selbständigkeit der Religion"; Zeitschrift /. Theologie u. Kit"che,
18 95, pp. 4 0 4. 4 0 5.
34 0 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
against Prof. Max Müller,-who had, however, on this point,
arrived at a position very like Tiele's own,-he impressively
insists that U the origin of religion consists," not in a II per-
ception of the Infinite," but " in the fact that Man has the
Infinite within him."-I would only contend further that the
instinct of the Infinite awakens simultaneously with our
sense-perceptions and categories of thinking, and passes,
together with them and with the deeper, more volitional
experiences, through every degree and stage of obscurity
and relative clearness. II Whatevername we give it,-instinct ;
innate, original, or unconscious form of thought; or form of
conception,-it is the specifically human element in man." 1
But if all this be true, then the Mystics are amongst the
great benefactors of our race: for it is especially this presence
of the Infinite in Man, and man's universal subjection to an
operative consciousness of it, which are the deepest cause
and the constant object of the adoring awe of all truly
spiritual Mystics, in all times and places.
1 Elements of the Science of Religion, 1897, Vol. II, pp. 221- 2 3 1 .
CHAPTER XV
SUMMING UP OF THE WHOLE BOOK. BACK THROUGH
ASCETICISM, SOCIAL RELIGION, AND THE SCIENTIFIC
HABIT OF MIND, TO THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF
RELIGION.
I NOW propose to conclude, by getting, through three
successively easier matters, back to the starting-point of this
whole book, and, in doing so, to sum up and delimitate, more
and more clearly, the practical lessons learnt during its long
course. These three last matters and points of observation
shall be Asceticism, Institutionalism, and Mental Activity
and Discipline, or the Scientific Habit-all three in their
relation to the Mystical Element of Religion.
I. ASCETICISM AND MYSTICISl\:f.
Now in the matter of Asceticism, we can agaIn con-
veniently consider three points.
I. Ordinary Ascet2"cism practised by Mystics.
There is, first, the (generally severe) Asceticism which is
ever connected with at least some one phase, an early one,
of every genuine Mystic's history, yet which does not differ
essentially from the direct training in self-conquest to which
practically all pre-Protestant, and most of the old Protest-
ant earnest Christians considered themselves obliged.
(I) Now it is deeply interesting to note how marked has been,
off and on throughout the last century and now again quite
recently, the renewal of comprehension and respect for the
general principle of Asceticism, in quarters certainly free from
all preliminary bias in favour of Medieval Christianity
Schopenhauer wrote in 1843: cc Not only the religions of
the East but also genuine Christianity shows, throughout its
systems, that fundamental characteristic of Asceticism which
my philosophy elucidates. . . . Precisely in its doctrines of
34 1
...
342 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
renunciation, self-denial, complete chastity, in a word, of
general mortification of the will, lie the deepest truth, the high
value, the sublime character of Christianity. It thus belongs to
the old, true, and lofty ideal of mankind, in opposition to the
false, shallow, and ruinous optimism of Greek Paganism,
Judaism and Islam." "Protestan tism, by eliminating Asceti-
cism and its central point, the meritoriousness of celibacy,
has, by this alone, already abandoned the innermost kernel
of Christianity. . . . For Christianity is the doctrine of the
deep guilt of the human race . . . and of the heart's thirst
after redemption from it, a redemption which can be acquired
only through the abnegation of self,-that is, through a com-
plete conversion of human nature." I-And the optimistically
tempered American Unitarian, the deeply versed Psycholo-
gist, Prof. William James, tells us in 1902: "In its spiritual
meaning, Asceticisn1 stands for nothing less than for the
essence of the twice-born philosophy." "The l\Ietaphysical
mystery, that he who feeds on death, that feeds on men,
possesses life supereminently, and meets best the secret de-
mands of the Universe, is the truth of which Asceticism has
been the faithful champion. The folly of the cross, so
inexplicable by the intellect, has, yet, its indestructible, vital
meaning. . . . Naturalistic optimism is mere syllabub and
sponge-cake in comparison." 2
(2) Indeed, the only thing at all special to Mysticism, in its
attitude towards this general principle and practice of
Asceticism, is that it ever practises Asceticism as a means
towards, or at least as the make-weight and safeguard of,
Contemplation, which latter is as essentially Synthetic, and,
in so far, peaceful and delightful, as the former is Analytic,
polemical and painful; whereas non - Mystical souls "rill practise
Asceticism directly with a view to greater aloofness from
sin, and greater readiness and strength to perform the various
calls of duty. And hence, if we but grant the legitimacy
of the general principle of ordinary Asceticism, we shall find
the Mystical form of this Asceticism to be the more easily
comprehensible variety of that principle. For the Mystic's
practice, as concerns this point, is more varied and inclusive
than that of others, since he does not even tend to make the
whole of his inner life into a system of checks and of tension.
1 Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung. ed. Griesbach. Vol. II. pp. 725.
734, 73 6 .
I The Varieties of R,zigious Experience. 1902. pp. 362. 364.
ASCETICISM AND MYSTICISI\1
343
The expansive, reconciling movement operates in him most
strongly also, and, where of the right kind, this expansive
movement helps, even more than the restrictive one, to purify
humble, and deepen his heart and soul.
2. God's Transcendence a source of suffering.
There is, however, a second, essentially different source
and kind of suffering in some sorts and degrees of Mysticism,
and indeed in other attraits of the spiritual life, which is
deeply interesting, because based upon a profound Meta-
physical apprehension. Although, at bottom, the opposite
extreme to Pantheism, it readily expresses itself, for reasons
that will presently appear, in terms that have a curiously
Pantheistic colour.
(I) St. John of the Cross writes in 1578: U It is a principle
of philosophy, that all means must. . . have a certain resem-
blance to the end, such as shall be sufficient for the object in
view. If therefore the understanding is to be united to
God, . . . it must make use of those means which can effect
that union, that is, means which are most like unto God. . . .
But there is no essential likeness or communion between
creatures and Him, the distance between His divine nature
and their nature is infinite. No creature therefore . . .
nothing that the imagination may conceive or the under-
standing comprehend . . . in this life . . . can be a proxi-
mate means of union with God," for U it is all most unlike
God, and most disproportionate to Him." II The understand-
ing . . . must be pure and empty of all sensible objects, all
clear intellectual perceptions, resting on faith: for faith is the
sole proximate and proportionate means of the soul's union
with God." 1
Now it is certain, as we have already found, that the
awakened human soul ever possesses a dim but real experience
of the Infinite, and that, in proportion as it is called to the
Mystical way, this sense will be deepened into various de-
grees of the Prayer of Quiet and of Union, and that here,
more plainly than elsewhere, will appear the universal
necessity of the soul's own response, by acts and the habit of
Faith, to all and every experience which otherwise remains
but so much unused material for the soul's advance. And it
is equally certain that St. John of the Cross is one of the
greatest of such contemplatives, and that neither his intuition
1 Ascent of Mount Carmel, tr. David Lewis, ed. 1 88 9, pp. 94. 95. 97.
344 THE IVIYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
and actual practice, nor even his sayings, (so long as anyone
saying belonging to one trend is set off against another
belonging to the other trend,) contravenes the Christian and
Catholic positions.- Yet it cannot be denied that, were we to
press his U negative way" into becoming the only one; and
especially were we to take, without discount, such a virtual
repudiation, as is furnished by any insistence upon the above
words, of any essential, objective difference in value between
our various apprehensions of Him and approaches to Him:
the whole system and rationale of External, Sacramental and
Historical Religion, indeed of the Incarnation, in any degree
and form, would have to go, as so many stumbling-blocks to
the soul's advance. For the whole principle of all such
Religion implies the profound importance of the Here and
the Now, the Contingent and the Finite, and of the Immanence
of God, in various degrees and ways, within them.
Indications of this incompatibility, as little systematically
realized here as in the Areopagite, are afforded by various
remarks of his, belonging in reality to another trend. Thus,
immediately before his denial of any essential likeness or
communion between any creature and God, he says: U It is
true that all creatures bear a certain relation to God and are
tokens of His Being, some more, some less, according to the
greater perfection of their nature." And of Our Lord's sacred
Humanity he says: U What a perfect living image was Our
Saviour upon earth: yet those who had no faith, though they
were constantly about Him, and saw His wonderful works,
were not benefited by His presence." 1 But even here the
immense importance, indeed downright necessity for Faith, of
such external and historical stimuli, objects and materials,-
in the latter instance all this at its very deepest,-remains
unemphasized, through his engrossment in the necessity of
Faith for the fructification of all these things.
In other places this Faith appears as though working so
outside of all things imageable, as to have to turn rapidly
away from all picturings, as, at best, only momentary starting-
points for the advanced soul. U Let the faithful soul take
care that, whilst contemplating an image, the senses be not
absorbed in it, whether it be material or in the imagination,
and whether the devotion it excites be spiritual or sensible.
Let him " , . venerate the image as the Church commands
.1 Ascent, pp. 94; 350.
ASCETICISM AND MYSTICISI\1 345
and lift up his mind at once from the material image to those
whom it represents. He who shall do this, will never be de-
luded." 1 Here, again, along the line of argument absorbing
the saint in this book, there is no funy logical ground left for
the Incarnational, Historical, Sacramental scheme of the Infi-
nite immanent in the finite, and of spirit stimulated in
contact with matter, with everywhere the need of the conde-
scensions of God and of our ascensions by means of careful
attention to them.
Sören Kierkegaard, that deep solitary Dane, with so much
about him like to Pascal the Frenchman, and Hurrell Froude
the Englishman, and who, though Lutheran in all his bringing
up, was so deeply attracted by Catholic Asceticism, has, in
recent times (he died in 1855), pushed the doctrine of the
qualitative, absolute difference between God and all that we
ourselves can think, feel, will or be, to lengths beyond even
the transcendental element,-we must admit this to be the
greatly preponderant one,-in the great Spaniard's formal
teaching. And it is especially in this non-
1 ystical Ascetic
that we get an impressive picture of the peculiar kind of
suffering and asceticism, which results from such a conviction
to a profoundly sensitive, absorbedly religious soul; and here
too we can, I think, discover the precise excess and onesided-
ness involved in this whole tendency. Professor Höffding,
in his most interesting monograph on his friend, tells us how
lC for Kierkegaard, . . . the will gets monopolized by religious
Eihics from the very first; there is no time for Contemplation
or Mysticism." II To tear the will away," Kierkegaard him-
self says, II from all finite aims and conditions . . . requires a
painful effort and this effort's ceaseless repetition. And if, in
addition to this, the soul has, in spite of all its striving, to be
as though it simply were not, it becomes clear that the reli-
gious life signifies a dedication to suffering and to self-
destruction. What wonder, then, that, for the Jew, death was
the price of seeing God; or that, for the Gentile, the soul's
entering into closer relations with the Deity meant the begin-
ning of madness?" For II the soul's relation to God is a
relation to a Being absolutely different from l\1an, who cannot
confront him as his Superlative or Ideal, and who, neverthe-
less, is to rule in his inmost soul. Hence a necessary division,
ver productive of new pains, is operative within man, as long
1- Ascent. p. 353.
346 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
as he perseveres in this spiritual endeavour. . . . A finite
being, he is to live in the Infinite and Absolute: he is there
like a fish upon dry land." 1
Now Prof. Höffding applies a double, most cogent criticism
to this position.-The one is religious, and has already been
quoted. "A God Who is not Ideal and Pattern is no God.
Hence the contention that the Nature of the Godhead is, of
necessity, qualitatively different from that of Man, has ever
occasioned ethical and religious misgivings."-And the other
is psychological. " Tension can indeed be necessary for the
truth and the force of life. But tension, taken by itself,
cannot furnish the true measure of life. For the general
nature of consciousness is a synthesis, a comprehensive unity:
not only contrast, but also concentration, must make itself
felt, as long as the life of consciousness endures." 2
It is deeply interesting to note how Catherine, and at
bottom St. John of the Cross and the Exclusive Mystics
generally, escape, through their practice and in some of their
most emphatic teachings, from Kierkegaard's excess, no doubt
in part precisely because they are 1\1 ystics, since the exclusive
l\iystic's contemplative habit is, at bottom, a Synthetic one.
Yet we should realize the deep truth which underlies the very
exaggerations of this onesidedly Analytic and Ascetical view.
For if God is the deepest ideal, the ultimate driving force and
the true congenital element and environment of Man, such
as Man cannot but secretly wish to will deliberately, and
which, at his best, Man truly wills to hold and serve: yet
God remains ever simply incompatible with that part of each
man's condition and volition which does not correspond to
the best and deepest which that Man himself sees or could
see to be the better, hie et nunc; and, again, He is ever,
even as compared with any man's potential best, infinitely
more and nobler, and, though here not in simple contradic-
tion, yet at a degree of perfection which enables Him, the
Supreme Spirit, to penetrate, as Immanent Sustainer or
Stimulator, and to confront, as Transcendent Ideal and End,
the little human spirit, so great in precisely this its keen
sense of experienced contrast.
Catherine exhibits well this double relation, of true contra-
diction, and of contrast, both based upon a certain genuine
1 Sõren Kierkegaard, von Harald Höffding. Germ. tr. 1896. pp. 116, 118.
120.
I Ibid. pp. 122; 130. 13 1 .
ASCETICISM AND MYSTICISM 347
affinity between the human soul and God. On one side of
herself she is indeed a veritable fish out of water; but, on the
other side of her, she is a fish happily disporting itself in its
very element, in the boundless ocean of God. On the one
side, snapping after air, in that seemingly over-rarified atmo-
sphere in which the animal man, the mere selfish individual,
cannot live; on the other side, expanding her soul's lungs
and drinking in light, life, and love, in that same truly rich
atmosphere, which, Itself Spirit, feeds and sustains her grow-
ing spiritual personality. And the Dialogo, in spite of its
frequently painful abstractness and empty unity, has, upon
the whole, a profound hold upon this great doctrine.
Yet it is in Catherine's own culminating intuition,-of the
soul's free choice of Purgatory, as a joyful relief from the
piercing pain of what otherwise would last for ever,-the
vividly perceived contrast between God's purity and her
soul's impurity, that we get, in the closest combination, in-
deed mutual causation, this double sense of lVlan's nearness to
and distance from, of his likeness and unlikeness to God. For
only if man is, in the deepest instincts of his soul, truly related
to God, and is capable of feeling, (indeed he ever actually,
though mostly dimly, experiences,) God's presence and this,
man's own, in great part but potential, affinity to Him: can
suffering be conceived to arise from the keen realization of
the contrast between God and man's own actual condition at
anyone moment; and can any expectation, indeed a swift
vivid instinct, arise within man's soul that the painful, directly
contradictory, discrepancy can and will, gradually though
never simply automatically, be removed. And though, even
eventually, the creature cannot, doubtless, ever become simply
God, yet it can attain, in an indefinitely higher degree, to
that affinity and union of will with God, which, in its highest
reaches and moments, it already now substantially possesses;
and hence to that full creaturely self-constitution and joy in
which, utterly trusting, giving itself to, and willing God, it
will, through and in Him, form an abidingly specific, unique
constituent and link of His invisible kingdom of souls, on
and on.
3. DisciPline of fleeing and of facing the M uUiple and
Contingent.
But there is a third attitude, peculiar (because of its pre-
ponderance) to the Mystics as such, an attitude in a manner
intermediate between that of ordinary Asceticism, and that of
348 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
the Suffering just described. The implications and effects
of, and the correctives for, this third attitude will occupy us
up to the end of this book. I refer to the careful turning-
away from all Multiplicity and Contingency, from the Visible
and Successive, from all that does or can distract and dissi-
pate, which is so essential and prevailing a feature in all
Mysticism, which indeed, in Exclusive Mysticism, is frankly
made into the one sole movement towards, and measure of,
the soul's perfection.
(I) It is true that to this tendency, when and in so far as it has
come so deeply to permeate the habits of a soul as to form a
kind of second nature, the name Asceticism cannot, in strict-
ness, be any more applied; since now the pain will lie, not in
this turning away from all that dust and friction, but, on the
contrary, in any forcing of the soul back into that turmoil.
And doubtless many, perhaps most, souls with a pronouncedly
mystical attrait, are particularly sensitive to all, even partial
and momentary, conflict. Yet we can nevertheless appropri-
ately discuss the matter under the general heading of Asceti-
cism, since, as a rule, much practice and sacrifice go to build
up this habit; since, in every case, this Abstractive Habit
shares with Ordinary Asceticism a pronounced hostility to
many influences and forces ever actually operative within
and around the undisciplined natural man; and since, above
all, the very complements and correctives for this Abstractive-
ness will ha ve to come from a further, deeper and wider
Asceticism, to be described presently.
(2) As to Ordinary Asceticism and this Abstractiveness, the
former fights the world and the self directly, and then only in
so far as they are discovered to be positively evil or definitely
to hinder positive good; it is directly attracted by the clash
and friction involved in such fighting; and it has no special
desire for even a transitory intense unification of the soul's
life: whereas the Abstractiveness turns away from, and rises
above, the world and the phenomenal self; their very exist-
ence, their contingency, the struggles alive within them, and
their (as it seems) inevitably disturbing effect upon the soul,
-are all felt as purely dissatisfying; and an innermost long-
ing for a perfect and continuous unification and overflowing
harmony of its inner life here possess the spirit.
(3) Now we have just seen how a movement of integration, of
synthesizing all the soul's piecemeal, inter-jostling acquisitions,
of restful healing of its wounds and rents, of sinking back,
ASCETICISM AND MYSTICISM 349
(from the glare and glitter of clear, and then ever fragmentary
perception, and from the hurry, strain and rapidly ensuing
distraction involved in all lengthy external action), into a
peaceful, dim rumination and unification, is absolutely neces-
sary, though in very various degrees and forms, for all in any
way complete and mature souls.-And we have, further back,
realized that a certain, obscure but profoundly powerful, direct
instinct and impression of God in the soul is doubtless at
work here, and, indeed, throughout all the deeper and nobler
movements of our wondrously various inner life. But what
concerns us here, is the question whether the con'lþlete action of
the soul, (if man would grow in accordance with his ineradic-
able nature, environment, and specific grace and call,) does
not as truly involve a corresponding counter-movement to this
intensely unitive and intuitive movement which, with most
men, and in most moments of even the minority of men,
forms but an indirectly willed condition and spontaneous
background of the soul.
(4) We have been finding, further, that all the Con-
tingencies, Multiplicities and Mediations which, one and all,
tend to appear to the Mystic as so many resistances and
distractions, can roughly be grouped under two ultimate
heads. These intruders are fellow-souls, or groups of fellow-
souls,-some social organism, the Family, Society, the State,
the Church, who provoke, in numberless degrees and ways,
individual affection, devotion, distraction, jealousy, as from
person towards person. Or else the intruders are Things
and Mechanical Laws, and these usually leave the Mystic
indifferent or irritate or distract him; but they can become
for him great opportunities of rest, and occasions for self-
discipline.
Yet this distinction between Persons and Things, (although
vital for the true apprehension of all deeper, above all of
the deepest Reality, and for the delicate discrimination
between what are but the means and what are the ends in
a truly spiritual life,) does not prevent various gradations
within, and continuous interaction between, each of these two
great groups. For in proportion as, in the Personal group,
the Individual appears as but parcel and expression of one of
the social organisms, does the impression of determinist Law,
of an impersonal Thing or blind Force, begin to mix with,
and gradually to prevail over, that of Personality. And in
proportion as, in the Impersonal group, Science comes to
350 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
include all careful and methodical study, according to the
most appropriate methods, of any and every kind of truth
and reality; and as it moves away from the conceptions of
purely quantitative matter, and of the merely numerically
different, entirely interchangeable, physical happenings, (all
so many mere automatic illustrations of mechanical La\v,)
011, through the lowly organisms of plant-life, and the ever
higher interiority and richer consciousness of animal life, up
to Man, with his ever qualitative Mind, and his ever non-
interchangeable, ever H effortful," achievements and elabora-
tions of types of beauty, truth and goodness in Human
History,-does Science itself come back, in its very method
and subject-matter, ever more nearly, to the great personal
starting-point, standard and ultimate motive of all our
specifically human activity and worth.
(5) Indeed, the two great continuous facts of man's life, first
that he thinks, feels, wills, and acts, in and with the he1p or
hindrance of that profoundly material Thing, his physical
body, and on occasion of, with regard to, the materials
furnished by the stimulations and impressions of his senses;
and again, that these latter awaken within him those, in them-
selves, highly abstract and Thing-like categories of his mind
which penetrate and give form to these materials; are enough
to show how close is the pressure, and how continuous the
effect, of Things upon the slow upbuilding of Personality.
(6) Fair approximations to these two kinds of Things, with
their quite irreplaceable specific functions within the economy
of the human mental life ,-the intensely concrete and parti-
cular Sense-Impressions, and the intensely abstract and
general Mental Categories,-reappear within the economy of
Characteristic Religion, in its Sacraments and its Doctrine.
And conversely, there exists, in rerU11l natura, no Science
worth having which is not, ultimately, the resultant of, and
which does not require and call forth, on and on, certain
special qualities, and combinations of qualities, of the truly
ethical, spiritual Personality. Courage, patience, perseverance,
candour, simplicity, self-oblivion, continuous generosity to-
wards others and willing correction of even one's own most
cherished views,-these things and their like are not the
quantitative determinations of Matter, but the qualitative
characteristics of Mind.
(7) I shall now, therefore, successively take Mysticism in its
attitude towards these two great groups of claimants upon
SOCIAL RELIGION AND MYSTICISM 35 1
its attention, the Personal and the Impersonal, even though
any strictly separate discussion of elements which, in practice,
ever appear together, cannot but have some artificiality. And
an apparent further complication will be caused by our having,
in each case, to contrast what Mysticism would do, if it
became Exclusive, with what it must be restricted to doing, if
it is to remain Inclusive, i. e. if it is to be but one element in
the constitution of that multiplicity in unity, the deep spiritual
Personality. The larger Asceticism will thus turn out to be
a wider and deeper means towards perfection than even
genuine Mysticism itself, since this Asceticism will have to
include both this Mysticism and the counter movement
within the one single, disciplined and purified life of the soul.
II. SOCIAL RELIGION AND MYSTICISM.
Introductory: the ruinousness of Exclusive ]vI ys#cism.
Prof. Harnack says in his Dogmengeschichte: U An old
fairy tale tells of a man who lived in ignorance, dirt and
wretchedness; and whom God invited, on a certain day, to
wish whatsoever he might fancy, and it should be given him.
And the man began to wish things, and ever more things, and
ever higher things, and all these things were given him. At
last he became presumptuous, and desired to become as the
great God Himself: when 10, instantly he was sitting there
again, in his dirt and misery. Now the history of Religion,-
especially amongst the Greeks and Orientals,-closely re-
sembles this fairy tale. For they began by wishing for them-
selves certain sensible goods, and then political, aesthetic,
moral and intellectual goods: and they were given them all.
And then they became Christians and desired perfect know-
ledge and a super-moral life : they even wished to become,
already here belo\v, as God Himself, in insight, beatitude and
life. And behold, they fell, not at once indeed, but with a
fall that could not be arrested, down to the lowest level, back
into ignorance, dirt and barbarism. . . . Like unto their
near spiritual relations, the Neo-Platonists, they were at first
over-stimulated, and soon became jaded, and hence required
ever stronger stimulants. And in the end, all these exquisite
aspirations and enjoyments turned into their opposite
extreme. " 1
1 Lehrbuch der Dogmengeschichte, cd. 1888. Vol. II. pp. 4 1 3, 414; 417.
352 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
However much may want discounting or supplementing
here, there is, surely, a formidable amount of truth in this
picture. And, if so, is Mysticism, at least in its Dionysian
type, not deeply to blame? And where is the safeguard
against such terrible abuses?
Now Prof. Harnack has himself shown us elsewhere
that there is a sense in which Monasticism should be con-
sidered eternal, even among and for Protestants. U Monasti-
cism," he says plaintively, in his account of the first three
centuries of Protestantism, U even as it is conceivable and
necessary among Evangelical Christians, disappeared alto-
gether. And yet every community requires persons, who live
exclusively for its purposes; hence the Church too requires
volunteers who shall renounce I the world' and shall dedicate
themselves entirely to the service of their neighbour." I-And
again, scholars of such breadth of knowledge and independ-
ence of judgement as Professor Tiele and his school, insist
strongly upon the necessity of Ecclesiastical Institutions and
Doctrines. The day of belief in the normality, indeed in the
possibility for mankind in general, of a would-be quite indi-
vidual, entirely spiritual, quite U pure" religion, is certainly
over and gone, presumably for good and all, amongst all
competent workers.-Nor, once more, can the general Mystical
sense of the unsatisfying character of all things finite, and of
the Immanence of the Infinite in our poor lives, be, in itself,
to blame: for we have found these experiences to mingle
with, and to characterize, all the noblest, most fully human
acts and personalities.-But, if so, what are the peculiarities
in the religion of those times and races, which helped to
produce the result pictured in the Dognzengeschichte ?
Now here, to get a fairly final answer, we must throw to-
gether the question of the ordinary Christian Asceticism and
that of the Abstraction peculiar to the Mystics; and we must
ask whether the general emotive-volitional attitude towards
Man and Life,-the theory and practice as to Transcendence
and Immanence, Detachment and Attachment, which, from
about 500 A.D. to, say, I450 A.D., predominantly preceded,
accompanied, and both expanded and deflected the specific-
ally Christian and normally human experience in Eastern
Christendom, were not (however natural, indeed inevitable,
and in part useful for those times and races), the chief of the
1 Das Wesen des Christenthums. ed. 1902. pp. 180. 18I.
SOCIAL RELIGION AND
IYSTICISM 353
causes which turned so much of the good of Mysticism into
downright harm. At bottom this is once more the question
as to the one-sided character of Neo-Platonism,-its incapacity
to find any descending movement of the Divine into Human
life.
I. True relation of the soul to its fellows. God's U jealousy."
Let us take first the relation of the single human soul to its
feHow-sows.
(I) Now Kierkegaard tells us: H the Absolute is cruel, for it
demands all, whilst the Relative ever continues to demand
some attention from us." 1 And the Reverend George Tyrrell,
in his stimulating paper, Poet and Mystic, shows us that, as
regards the relations between man's love for man and man's
love for God, there are two conceptions and answers in reply
to the question as to the precise sense in which God is
H a jealous God," and demands to be loved alone. In the
first, easier, more popular conception, He is practicaHy
thought of as the First of Creatures, competing with the rest
for l\lan's love, and is here placed alongside of them. Hence
the inference that whatever love they win from us by reason
of their inherent goodness, is taken from Him: He is not
loved perfectly, till He is loved alone. But in the second,
more difficult and rarer conception, God is placed, not along-
side of creatures but behind them, as the light which shines
through a crystal and lends it whatever lustre it may have.
He is loved here, not apart from, but through and in them.
Hence if only the affection be of the right kind as to mode
and object, the more the better. The love of Him is the
U form," the principle of order and harmony; our natural
affections are the (( matter" harmonized and set in order; it is
the soul, they are the body, of that one Divine Love whose
adequate object is God in, and not apart from, His creatures. 2
Thus we have already found that even the immensely abstrac-
tive and austere St. John of the Cross tells us: uNo one
desires to be loved except for his goodness; and when we
love in this way, our love is pleasing unto God and in great
liberty; and if there be attachment in it, there is greater
attachment to God." And this doctrine he continuously,
deliberately practises, half-a-century after his Profession, for
he writes to his penitent, Donna Juana de Pedrazas in 1589 :
U All that is wanting now, is that I should forget you; but
1 Hôfiding's Kierkegaard, p. 119.
11 The Faith of the Million. 1901. Vol. II. pp. 49. 50; 52. 53.
VOL. II. A A
354 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
consider how that is to be forgotten which is ever present to
the soul." 1
But Father Tyrrell rightly observes: H To square this view
with the general ascetic tradition of the faithful at large is
exceedingly difficult." 2 Yet I cannot help thinking that a
somewhat different reconciliation, than the one attempted by
him,3 really meets all the substantial requirements of the
case.
(2) I take it, then, that an all-important double law or twin
fact, or rather a single law and fact whose unity is composed
of two elements, is, to some extent, present throughout all
characteristically human life, although its full and balanced
realization, even in theory and still more in practice, is ever,
necessarily, a more or less unfulfilled ideal: viz. that not
only there exist cer:tain objects, acts, and affections that are
simply wrong, and others that are simply right or perfect,
either for all men or for some men: but that there exist
simply no acts and affections which, however right, however
obligatory, however essential to the perfection of us all or of
some of us, do not require, on our own part, a certain alter-
nation of interior reserve and detachment away from, and
of familiarity and attachment to, them and their objects.
This general law applies as truly to Contemplation as it does
to Marriage.
And next, the element of detachment which has to pene-
trate and purify simply all attachments,-even the attachment
to detachment itself,-is the more difficult, the less obvious,
the more profoundly spiritual and human element and move-
ment, although only on condition that ever some amount of
the other, of the outgoing element and movement, and of
attachment, remains. For here, as everywhere, there is no
good and operative yeast except with and in flour; there can
be no purification and unity without a material and a multi-
plicity to purify and to unite.
And again, given the very limited power of attention and
articulation possessed by individual man, and the importance
to the human community of having impressive embodiments
and examples of this, in various degrees and ways, univers-
ally ever an-but-forgotten, universally difficult, universally
necessary, universally ennobling renunciation: we get the
1 Works. tr. David Lewis. ed. 1889. 1891, Vol. I. p. 308; Vol. II.
p. 54 1 .
lOp. cit. p. 53. I Ibid. pp. 55. 56.
SOCIAL RELIGION AND MYSTICISM 355
reason and justification for the setting apart of men specially
drawn and devoted to a maximum, or to the most difficult
kinds, of this renunciation. As the practically universal
instinct, or rudimentary capacity, for Art, Science, and
Philanthropy finds its full expression in artists, scientists,
philanthropists, whose specific glory and ever necessary
corrective it is that they but articulate clearly, embody mas-
sively and, as it were, precipitate what is dimly and intermit-
tingly present, as it were in solution, throughout the
consciousness and requirements of Mankind; and neither the
inarticulate instinct, diffused among all, would completely
suffice for anyone of the majority, without the full articulation
by a few, nor the full articulation by this minority could
thrive, even for this minority itself, were it not environed by,
and did it not voice, that dumb yearning of the race at large:
so, and far more, does the general religiosity and sense of the
Infinite, and even its ever-present element and requirement of
Transcendence and Detachmen t, seek and call forth some
typical, wholesomely provocative incorporation ,-yet , here,
with an even subtler and stronger interdependence, between
the general demand and the particular supply.
And note that, if the minority will thus represent a
maximum of U form," with a minimum of U matter," and the
majority a maximum of U matter," with a minimum of U fonn":
yet some form as well as some matter must be held by each;
and the ideal to which, by their mutual supplementations,
antagonisms, and corrections, they will have more and more
to approximate our corporate humanity will be a maximum
of U matter," permeated and spiritualized by a maximum of
U fonn." If it is easy for the soul to let itself be invaded and
choked by the wrong kind of U matter," or even sImply by an
excess of the right kind, so that it will be unable to stamp the
U matter" with spiritual U form"; the opposite extreme also,
where the spiritual forces have not left to them a sufficiency
of material to penetrate or of life-giving friction to overcome,
is ever a most real abuse.
2. Ordinary Ascesis corrected by Socz'al Ch1'istianity.
Now it is very certain that Ordinary Asceticism and Social
Christianity are, in their conjunction, far less open to this
latter danger than is the Mystical and Contemplative Detach-
ment. For the former combination possesses the priceless
conception of the soul's personaJity being constituted in and
through the organism of the religious society,-the visible and
356 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
invisible Ohurch. This Society is no mere congeries of
severally self-sufficing units, each exclusively and directly
dependent upon God alone; but, as in St. Paul's grand figure
of the body, an organism, giving their place and dignity to
each several organ, each different, each necessary, and each
influencing and influenced by all the others. We have here,
as it were, a great living Cloth of Gold, with, not only the
woof going from God to Man and from Man to God, but also
the warp going from Man to Man,-the greatest to the least,
and the least back to the greatest. And thus here the primary
and full Bride of Christ never is, nor can be, any individual
soul, but only this complete organism of all faithful souls
throughout time and space; and the single soul is such a
Bride only in so far as it forms an operative constituent of this
larger whole.-And hence the soul of a Mystical habit will
escape the danger of emptiness and inflation if it keeps up
some,-as much indeed as it can, without permanent distrac-
tion or real violation of its special helps and call,-of that
outgoing, social, co-operative action and spirit, which, in the
more ordinary Christian Hfe, has to form the all but exclusive
occupation of the soul, and which here, indeed, runs the risk
of degenerating into mere feverish, distracted U activity."
I take the right scheme for this complex matter to have
been all but completely outJined by Plato, in the first plan of
his Republic, and indeed to have been largely derived by
Christian thinkers from this source; and the excessi ve and
one-sided conception to have been largeìy determined by his
later additions and changes in that great book, especially as
these have been all but exclusively enforced, and still further
exaggerated, by Plotinus and Proclus. As Erwin Rohde
finely says of this later teaching of Plato: II It was at the
zenith of his life and thinking that Plato completed his ideal
picture of the State, according to the requirements of his
wisdom. Over the broad foundation of a population dis-
criminated according to classes, (a foundation which, in its
totality and organization, was to embody the virtue of justice
in a form visible even from afar, and which formerly had
seemed to him to fulfil the whole function of the perfect
State,) there now soars, pointing up into the super-mundane
ether, a highest crown and pinnacle, to which all the lower
serves but as a substructure to render possible this life in the
highest air. A small handful of citizens, the Philosophers,
form this final point of the pyramid of the State. In this
SOCIAL RELIGION AND MYSTICISM 357
State, ordered throughout according to the ends of ethics,
these Philosophers will, it is true, take part in the Government,
not joyously, but for duty's sake; as soon, however, as duty
permits, they will eagerly return to that super-mundane con-
templation, which is the end and true content of their life's
activity. Indeed, in reality, the Ideal State is now built up,
step by step, for the' one ultimate' purpose of preparing an
abode for these Contemplatives, of training them in their
vocation, the highest extant, and of providing a means for the
insertion of Dialectic, as a special form of life and the highest
aim of human endeavour, into the general organism of the
earthly, civilized life. 'The so-called virtues' all here sink
into the shade before the highest force of the soul, the mystic
Contemplation of the Eternal. . . . To bring his own life to
ripeness for its own redemption, that is now the perfect sage's
true, his immediate duty. If, nevertheless, he has still to
bethink himself of acting upon and of moulding the world
the virtues will spontaneously present themselves to him: for
he now possesses Virtue itself; it has become his essential
condition." 1
I t is truly impressive to find here, in its most perfect and
most influential form, that ruinously untrue doctrine of the
separa tion of anyone set of men from the mass of their
fellows, and of Contemplation from interest in other souls,
taking the place, (in the same great mind, in the same great
book,) of the beautifully humble, rich, and true view of a
constant, necessary interchange of gifts and duties between
the various constituents of a highly articulated organism, a
whole which is indefinitely greater than, and is alone the fun
means, end and measure of, all its several, even its noblest,
parts.- Y et the Christian, indeed every at all specifically
religious, reader, will have strongly felt that the second scheme
possesses, nevertheless, at least one point of advantage over
the earlier one. For it alone brings out clearly that element
of Transcendence, that sense and thirst of the Infinite, which
we have agreed upon as the deepest characteristic of man.
And if this point be thus true and important, then another,-
the making of Contemplation into a special vocation,-can
hardly be altogether incorrect.
But if this is our judgment, how are we to harmonize
these two points of PIa to's later scheme with the generai
I Psyche. ed. 1898. Vol. II. pp. 292. 293.
358 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
positions of the earlier one? Or, rather, how are we to actuate
and to synthesize our complex present-day requirements and
duties, Christian and yet also Modern, Transcendental and
yet Immanental too? For if we have any delicately vivid
sense of,and sympathy with, the original, very simple,intensely
transcendental, form and emphasis of the Christian teaching,
and any substantial share in the present complex sense of
obligation to various laws and conceptions immanent in
different this-world organizations and systems: we shall
readily feel how indefinitely more difficult and deep the ques-
tion has become since Plato's, and indeed since the School-
men's time.
3. Preliminary Pessimis1n and ulti1nate Optinzism of
Christianity.
Now I think it is Prof. Ernst Troeltsch who has most
fully explicitated the precise centre of this difficulty, which,
in its acuteness, is a distinctly modern one, and the direction
in which alone the problem's true solution should be sought.
(r) H The chief problem of Christian Ethics," he says, H is
busy," not with the relation between certain subjective means
and dispositions, but H with the relation between certain
objective ends, which have, in some way, to be thought
together by the same mind as so many several objects, and
to be brought by it and within it to the greatest possible
unity. And the difficulty here lies in the fact, that the
sub-lunar among these ends are none the less moral ends,
bearing the full specific character of moral values,-that they
are ends-in-themselves, and necessary for their own sakes,
even at the cost of man's natural happiness; and yet that
they operate in the visible world, and adhere to historical
formations which proceed from man's natural constitution,
and dominate his earthly horizon; whilst the Super-worldly
End cannot share its rule with any other end. Yet the
special characteristic of modem ci viliza tion resides precisely
in such a simultaneous insistence upon the Inner-worldly
Ends, as possessing the nature of ends-in-themselves, and
upon the Religious, Super-worldly End: it is indeed from
just this combination that this civilization derives its peculiar
richness, power, and freedom, but also its painful, interior
tension and its difficult problems."
(2) The true solution of the difficulty surely is that II Ethical
life is not, in its beginnings, a unity but a multiplicity: man
grows up amidst a number of moral ends, whose unification is
SOCIAL RELIGION AND l\iYSTICISl\1 359
not his starting-point but his problem. And this multiplicity
can be still further defined as the polarity of two poles,
inherent in man's nature, of which the two chief types proceed
respectively from the religious and from the inner-worldly
self-determination of the soul,-the polarity of Religious, and
that of Humane Ethics, neither of which can be dispensed
with without moral damage, yet which cannot be brought
completely under a common formula. On this polarity
depends the richness, but also the difficulty, of our life, since
the sub-lunar ends remain, to a large extent, conditioned by
the necessities and pre-requisites of their own special subject-
matters, and since only on condition of being thus recognized
as ends in themselves, can they attain to their morally
educative power." 1
(3) Or, to put the same matter from the point of view of
definitely Christian experience and conviction: U The formula,
for the specific nature of Christianity, can only be a complex
conception,-the special Christian form," articulation and
correction, U of the fundamental thoughts concerning God,
World, Man and Redemption which," with indefinite varia-
tions of fulness and worth, " are found existing together in all
the religions. And the tension present in this multiplicity of
elements thus brought together is of an importance equal to
that of the multiplicity itself; indeed in this tension resides
the main driving-force of Religion. Christianity" in particular
U embraces a polarity within itself, and its formula must be
dualistic; it resembles, not a circle with one centre, but an
ellipse with two focuses. For Christianity is," unchangeably,
U an Ethics of Redemption, with a conception of the world
both optimistic and pessimistic, both transcendental and
immanent ai, and an apprehension both of a severe antagonism
and of a close interior union between the world and God. It
is, in principle, a Dualism, and yet a Dualism which is ever in
process of abolition by Faith and Action. I t is a purely
Religious Ethic, which concentrates man's soul, with abrupt
exclusiveness, upon the values of the interior life; and yet,
again, it is a Humane Ethic, busy with the moulding and
transforming of nature, and through love bringing about an
eventual reconciliation with it. At one time the one, at
another time the other, of these poles is prominent: but
neither of them may be completely absent, if the Christian
1 II Grundprobleme der Ethik H: Zeitsch"ift für Theologie und Kirche.
19\)2. pp. 16 4. 16 7.
3 60 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
outlook is to be maintained.-And yet the original germ of
the whole vast growth and movement ever remains an in tensely,
abruptly Transcendent Ethic, and can never simply pass over
into a purely Immanental Ethic. The Gospel ever remains,
with all possible clearness and keenness, a Promise of Re-
demption, leading us, away from the world, from nature and
from sin, from earthly sorrow and earthly error, on and on to
God; and which cannot allow the last word to be spoken in
this life. Great as are its incentives to ReconciliatiDn, it is
never entirely resolvable into them. And the importance of
that classical beginning ever consists in continuously calling
back the human heart, away from all Culture and Immanence,
to that which lies above both." 1
(4) We thus get at last a conception which really covers, I
think, all the chief elements of this complex matter. But the
reader will have noted that it does so by treating the whole
problem as one of Spiritual Dynamics, and not of Intellectual
Statics. For the conception holds and requires the existence
and cultivation of three kinds of action and movement in the
soul. There are, first, the various centres of human energy
and duty of a primarily This-world character, each of which
possesses its own kind and degree of autonomy, laws, and
obligations. There is, next, the attempt at organizing an
increasing interaction between, and at harmonizing, (whilst
never emasculating or eliminating,) these various, severally
characteristic, systems of life and production into an ever
larger ultimate unity. And, lastly, there is as strong a turn-
ing away from all this occupation with the Contingent and
Finite, to the sense. and apprehension of the Infinite and
Abiding. And this dynamic system is so rich, even in the
amount of it which can claim the practice of the majority of
souls, as to require definite alternations in the occupations of
such souls, ranging thus, in more or less rhythmic succession,
from earth to Rea ven and from Rea ven back again to earth.
(5) And so great and so inexhaustible is this living system,
even by mankind at large , that it has to be more or less
parcelled out amongst various groups of men, each group
possessing its own predominant attrait,-either to work out
one of those immanental interests, say Art, Natural Science,
Politics; or to fructify one or more of these relatively inde-
1 II Was heisst Wesen des Christenthums? U Christliche Welt, 1903, I,
coIl. 583, 584. The Abbé Loisy has also dwelt, with rare impressiveness.
upon the intensely Other-Worldly character of the first Christian teaching.
SOCIAL RELIGION AND MYSTICISM 361
pendent interests, by crossing it with one or more of the others;
or to attempt to embrace the whole of these intra-mundane
interests in one preliminary final system; or to turn away from
this whole system and its contents to the Transcendent and
Infinite; or finally to strive to combine, as far as possible,
this latter Fleeing to the Infinite with all that former Seeking
of the Finite.-We shall thus get specialists within one single
domain; and more many-sided workers who fertilize one
Science by another; and philosophers of Science or of History,
or of both, who strive to reach the rationale of all knowledge
of the Finite and Contingent; and Ascetics and Contempla-
tives who, respectively, call forth and dwell upon the sense and
presence of the Infinite and Abiding, underlying and accom-
panying all the definite apprehensions of things contingent;
and finally, the minds and wills that feel called to attempt as
complete a development and organization as possible of all
these movements.
4. Subdivision of sPiritual labour: its necessity and its
dangers.
And yet all the subdivision of labour we have just required
can avoid doing harm, directly or indirectly, (by leading to
Materialism, Rationalism, or Fanaticism, to one or other of
the frequent but ever mischievous Ie Atomisms,") only on con-
dition that it is felt and worked as such a subdivision. In
other \-vords, every soul must retain and cultivate some sense
of, and respect for, the other chief human activities not
primarily its own. For, as a matter of fact, even the least
rich or developed individual requires and practises a certain
amount, in an inchoate form, of each and all of these energiz-
ings; and he can, fruitfully for himself and others, exercise
a maximum amount of anyone of them, only if he does not
altogether and deliberately neglect and exclude the others;
and, above all, if, in imagination and in actual practice, he
habitually turns to his fellow-men, of the other types and
centres, to supplement, and to be supplemented by, them.
I t will be found, I think, that the quite undeniable abuses
that have been special to the Ascetic and Contemplative
methods and states, have all primarily sprung from that most
plausible error that, if these energizings are, in a sense, the
highest in and for man, then they can, at least in man's ideal
action and condition, dispense with other and lower energizings
and objects altogether. Yet both for man's practice here and
even for his ideal state in the hereafter, this is not so. There
362 THE MYSTICAl, ELEMENT OF RELIGION
is no such thing,-either in human experience or in the
human ideal, when both are adequately analyzed and formu-
lated,-as discursive reasoning, without intuitive reason; or
clear analysis and sense of contrast, without dim synthesis and
a deep consciousness of similarity or continuity; or detach-
ment of the will from evil, without attachment of the higher
feelings to things good; or the apprehension and require-
ments of Multiplicity, without those of Unity; or the vivid
experience of Contingency, Mutation, and the Worthlessly
Subjective, without the, if obscure yet most powerful, instinct
of the Infinite and Abiding, of the true Objective and Valu-
able Subjective. Thus, for humanity at large entirely, and
for each human individual more or less, each member of
t
ese couples requires, and is occasioned by, the other, and
V'lce versa.
The maxims that follow from this great fact are as plain
in reason, and as immensely fruitful in practice, as they are
difficult, though ever freshly interesting, to carry out, at all
consistently, even in theory and still more in act. For the
object of a wise living will now consist in introducing an ever
greater unity into the multiplicity of our lives,-up to the
point where this unity's constituents would, like the opposing
metals in an electric battery, become too much alike still to
produce a fruitful interaction, and where the unity would,
thus and otherwise, become empty and mechanical; and an
ever greater multiplicity into the unity,-up to the point
where that multiplicity would, seriously and permanently,
break up or weaken true recollection; and in more and more
expanding this \vhole individual organism, by its insertion, as
a constituent part, into larger groups and systems of interests.
The Family, the Nation, Human Society, the Church,-these
are the chief of the larger organizations into which the
inchoate, largely only potential, organism of the individual
man is at first simply passively born, yet which, if he would
grow, (not in spite of them, a hopeless task, but by them,)
he will have deliberately to endorse and will, as though they
were his own creations.
5. Mystics and SPiritual Direction.
It is interesting to note the special characteristics attaching
to the one social relation emphasized by the medieval and
modern varieties of Western Catholic Mysticism; and the
effect which a larger development of the other chief forces
and modalities of the Catholic spiritual life necessarily has
SOCIAL RELIGION AND MYSTICISM 363
upon this relation. I am thinking of the part played by the
Director, the soul's leader and adviser, in the lives of these
Mystics,-a part which differs, in three respects, from that of
the ordinary Confessor in the life of the more active or
II mixed" type of Catholic.
(r) For one thing, there is here a striking variety and
range, in the ecclesiastical and social position of the persons
thus providentially given and deliberately chosen. The early
German Franciscan Preacher, Berthold of Regensburg, owes
his initiation into the Interior Life to his Franciscan Novice-
Master, the Partial Mystic, David of Augsburg, whose
writings still give forth for us their steady light and genial'
warmth; the French widowed noblewoman and Religious
Foundress, St. Jane Frances de Chantal, is helped on her
course to high contemplation by the Secular Priest and
Bishop, St. Francis de Sales; the French Jesuit, Jean
Nicolas Grou, is initiated, after twenty-four years' life and
training in his Order, by the Visitation Nun, Sæur Pélagie,
into that more Mystical spirituality, which constitutes the
special characteristic of his chief spiritual books; the great
Spaniard, St. Teresa herself, tells us how " a saintly noble-
man. . . a married layman, who had spent nearly forty years
in prayer, seems to me to have been, by the pains he took,
the beginning of salvation to my soul" - (( his power was great" ;
and the English Anchorite, Mother Juliana of Norwich, " a
simple, unlettered creature," seems to have found no special
leader on to her rarely deep, wide, and tender teachings,
but to have been led and stimulated, beyond and after her
first general Benedictine training, by God's Providence alone,
working through the few and quite ordinary surroundings
and influences of her Anchorage at Norwich. 1 It would be
difficult to find anything to improve in this noble liberty of
these great children of God; nor would a larger influence of
the other modalities necessarily restrict this ample range.
(2) Again, the souls of this type seem, for the most part, to
rea1ize more fully and continuously than those of the ordinary,
simply active and ascetical kind, that the" blind obedience"
towards such leaders, so often praised in their disciples and
1 Deutsche Mystiker des Mittelalters. ed. Pfeiffer. Vol. I. 1845. pp. xli,
xlii. Any Life of St. Jane F. de Chantal. A. Cadrès. Le P. Jean N.
Grou. 1866. pp. 13. 14. St. Teresa's Life. written by Herself. tr. David
Lewis. ed. 1888. pp. 176. 177; 186. Revelations of Divine Love. showed
to Mother Juliana of Norwich, ed. 1902. p. 4.
3 6 4 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
penitents, is, where wholesome and strengthening, essentially
a simple, tenacious adherence, during the inevitable times of
darkness and perplexity, to the encouragements given by the
guide to persevere along the course and towards the truths
which this soul itself saw clearly, often through the instrument-
ality of this leader, when it was in light and capable of a
peaceful, deliberate decision. For however much the light
may have been given it through this human mediation, (and
the most numerous, and generally the most important, of our
lights, have been acquired thus through the spoken, \vritten,
or acted instrumentality of fellow-souls,)-yet the light was
seen, and had (in the first instance) to be seen, by the
disciple's own spiritual eye; and it is but to help it in
keeping faithful to this light (which, in the first and last
instance, is God's light and its own) that the leader stands
by and helps. But, given this important condition, there
remains the simple, experimental fact that, not only can
and do others often see our spiritual whereabouts and God's
attraz"t for us more clearly than we do ourselves, but such
unselfseeking transmission and such humbly simple reception
of light between man and man adds a moral and spiritual
security and beauty to the illumination, (all other conditions
being equal and appropriate,) not to be found otherwise.
It is interesting to note the courageous, balanced, and
certainly quite unprejudiced, testimony borne to these im-
portant points, by so widely read, and yet upon the whole
strongly Protestant, a pair of scholars, as Miss Alice Gardner
and her very distinguished brother, Professor Percy Gardner. 1
(3) And final1y, the souls of this type have, (at least for
the two purposes of the suscitation of actual insight, and for
bearing witness to this, now past, experience during the soul's
perio
s of gloom), often tended,-in \Vestern Christendom
and during Medieval and still more in Modern times,-to
exalt the office and power of the Director, in the life of the
soul of the Mystical type, very markedly beyond the functions,
rights and duties of the ordinary Confessor in the spiritual
Jife of the ordinary Catholic.
Indeed they and their interpreters have, in those times
and places, often insisted upon the guarantee of safety thus
afforded, and upon the necessity of such fonnal and sys-
tematic mediation, with an absoluteness and vehemence
1 A. Gardner, II Confession and Direction." in The Conflict of Duties,
19 0 3, pp. 223- 22 9. P. Gardner, in The Liberal Chu,.c
man. 1905. p. 266.
SOCIAL RELIGION AND MYSTICISM 3 6 5
impossible to conciliate with any full and balanced, especially
with any at all orthodox, reading of Church History. For
this feature is as marked in the condemned book of Molinos
and of most of the other Quietists, as it is in such thoroughly
approved Partial Mysticism as that of Père Lallemant and
Père Grou: hence it alone cannot, surely, render a soul com-
pletely safe against excesses and delusions. And this feature
was markedly in abeyance, often indeed, for aught we know,
completely wanting, at least in any frequent and methodic
form, in the numerous cases of the Egyptian and other
Fathers of the Desert: hence it cannot be strictly essential
to all genuine Contemplation in all times and places.
(4) The dominant and quite certain fact here seems to be
that, in proportion as the Abstractive movement of the soul is
taken as self-sufficient, and a Contemplative life is attempted
as something substantially independent of any concrete, social,
and devotional helps and duties, the soul gets into a state
of danger, which no amount of predominance of the Director
can really render safe; whereas, in proportion as the soul
takes care to practise, in its own special degree and manner,
the outgoing movement towards Multiplicity and Contin-
gency, (particular attention to particular religious facts and
particular service of particular persons), does such right, quite
ordinary-seeming, active subordination to, and incorporation
within, the great sacred organisms of the Family, Society,
and the Church, or of any wise and helpful subdivision of
these, furnish material, purgation and check for the other
movement, and render superfluous any great or universal
predominance of Direction. St. Teresa is, here also,
wonderfully many-sided and balanced. Just as she comes
to regret ha ving ever turned aside from Ghrist's Sacred
Humanity, so too she possesses, indeed she never loses, the
sense of the profoundly social character of Christianity: she
dies as she had lived, full of an explicit and deep love for the
Kingdom of God and the Church.
6. Mysticism predominantly lndividualisi'ic.
Yet it is clear that the strong point of the l\Iystics, as such,
does not lie in the direction of the great social spirituality
which finds God in our neighbour and in the great human
organizations, through and in which, after all, man in great
part becomes and is truly man. They are, as such, Individu-
alistic; the relation between God and the individual soul
here ever tends to appear as constituted by these two forces
366 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
alone. A fresh proof, if one were still wanting, that Mys-
ticism is but one of the elements of Religion,-for Religion
requires both the Social and the Individual, the Corporate
and the Lonely movement and life.
It is truly inspiring to note how emphatic is the concur-
rence of all the deepest and most circumspect contemporary
Psychology, Epistemology, Ethics, and History and Philo-
sophy of the Sciences and of Religion, in these general
conclusions, which find, within the slow and many-sided
growth and upbuilding of the spiritual personality, a true and
necessary place and function for all the great and permanent
capabilities, aspirations and energizings of the human soul.
Thus no system of religion can be complete and deeply
fruitful which does not embrace, (in every possible kind of
healthy development, proportion and combination), the several
souls and the several types of sollis who, between them,
will afford a maximum of clear a pprehension and precise
reasoning, and of dim experience and intuitive reason; of
particlliar attention to the Contingent (Historical Events and
Persons, and Institutional Acts and Means) and of General
Recollection and Contemplation and Hungering after the
Infinite; and of reproductive Admiration and Loving
Intellection, and of quasi-creative, truly productive Action
upon and within Nature and other souls, attaining, by such
Action, most nearly to the supreme attribute, the Pure
Energizing of God.
Thus Pseudo-Dionysius and St. John of the Cross will,
even in their most Negative doctrines, remain right and
necessary in all stages of the Church's life,-on condition,
however, of being taken as but one of two great movements,
of which the other, the Positive movement, must also ever
receive careful attention: since only between them is attained
that all-important oscillation of the religious pendulum, that
interaction between the soul's meal and the soul's yeast, that
furnishing of friction for force to overcome, and of force to
overcome the friction, that material for the soul to mould, and
in moulding which to develop itself, that alternate expiration
and inspiration, upon which the solli's mysterious death-in-
life and life-in-death so continuously depends.
THE SCIENTIFIC HABrf AND l\iYSTICIS1\I 367
III. THE SCIENTIFIC HABIT AN D 1\1 YSTICISl\I.
Introductory. Difficulty yet Necessity of finding a True
Place and Function for Science in the SPiritual Life.
Now it is certain that such an oscillatory movement, such
a give-and-take, such a larger Asceticism, built up out of the
alternate engrossment in and abstraction from variously, yet
in each case really, attractive levels, functions and objects of
human life and experience, is still comparatively easy, as long
as we restrict it to two out of the three great groups of ener-
gizings which are ever, at least potentially, present in the soul,
and which ever inevitably help to make or mar, to develop or
to stunt, the totality of the soul's life, and hence also of the
strictly spiritual life. The Historical-Institutional, and the
Mystical-Volitional groups and forces, the High-Church and
the Low-Church trend, the Memory- and the Will-energies,
do indeed coalesce, in times of peace, with the Reason-
energy, though, even then, with some difficulty. But in times
of war,-on occasion of any special or excessive action on the
part of this third group, the Critical-Speculative, the Broad-
Church trend, and the energizing of the Understanding,-they
readily combine against every degree of the latter. It is as
though the fundamental vowels A and U could not but
combine to oust the fundamental vowel I; or as if the
primary colours Red and Blue 11lUst join to crush out the
primary colour Yellow.
Indeed, it is undoubtedly just this matter of the full and
continuous recognition of, and allocation of a special function
to, this third element within the same great spiritual
organism which englobes the other two, which is now the
great central difficulty and pressing problem of more or less
every degree and kind of religious life. For the admission
of this third element appears frequently to be ruinous to the
other two; yet the other two, when kept away from it, seem
to lose their vigour and persuasive power.-And yet it is, I
think, exactly at this crucial point that the conception of the
spiritual life as essential1y a Dynamism, a slow constitution
of an ever fuller, deeper, more close-knit unity in, and by
means of, the soul's ineradicable trinity of forces, shows all
its fruitfulness, if we but work down to a sufficiently large
apprehension of the capacities and requirements of human
nature, moved and aided by divine grace, and to a very
368 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
precise delimitation of the special object and function of
Mysticism.
I. Science and Religion: each autonomous at its own level;
and, thus, each helPful to the other.
Erwin Rohde has well described Plato's attitude towards
Science and Mysticism respectively, and towards the question
of their inter-relation. ,. The flight from the things of this
World is, for Plato, already in itself an acquisition of those of
the Beyond, and an assimilation to the Divine. For this
poor world, that solicits our senses, the philosopher has, at
bottom, nothing but negation. Incapable as it is of furnishing
a material that can be truly known, the whole domain of the
Transitory and Becoming has no intrinsic significance for
Science as understood by him. The perception of things
which are ever merely relative, and which simultaneously
manifest contradictory qualities, has its sole use in stimu-
lating and inviting the soul to press on to the Absolute." 1
Here we should frankly admit that the soul's hunger for
the Infinite is, as the great Athenian so deeply realized, the
very mainspring of Religion; and yet we must maintain that
it is precisely this single bound away, instead of the ever-
repeated double movement of a coming and a going, which
not only helped to suppress, or at least gravely to stunt, the
growth of the sciences of external observation and experiment,
but (and this is the special point,-the demonstrable other
side of the medal,) also, in its degree, prevented religion from
attaining to its true depth, by thus cutting off, as far as
Plato's conviction prevailed, the very material, stimulation,
and in part the instruments, for the soul's outgoing, spiritu-
alizing work, together with this work's profound reflex effect
upon the worker, as a unique occasion for the growth and
self-detachment of the soul.
Now the necessity for such a first stage and movement,
which, as far as possible both immanen tal and phenomenalist,
shall be applied and restricted to the special methods, direct
objects, and precise range of each particular Science, and
the importance of the safeguarding of this scientific liberty,
are now clearly perceived, by the leading men of Religion,
Philosophy, Psychology and Physics, in connection with the
maintenance and acquisition of sincere and fruitful Science.-
It is also increasingly seen that, even short of Religion, a
1 Psyche, ed. 1898. Vol. II, p. 289.
THE SCIENTIFIC HABIT AND MYSTICISM 369
second, an interpretative, an at least Philosophical stage and
movement is necessary for the full explicit at ion of Science's
own assumptions and affinities. And the keeping of these
two movements clearly distinct or even strongly contrasted,
is felt, by some far-sighted Theologians, to be a help towards
securing, not only a candid attitude of Science towards
its own subject-matters, but also a right independence of
Philosophy and Theology towards the other Sciences. Thus
Cardinal Newman has brought out, with startling force, the
necessarily non-moral, non-religious character of Physico-
l\ia thema tical Sci ence, taken simply within its direct su bj ect-
matter and method. II Physical science never travels beyond
the examination of cause and effect. Its object is to resolve
the complexity of phenomena into simple elements and
principles; but when it has reached those first elements,
principles and laws, its mission is at an end; it keeps within
that material system with which it began, and never ventures
beyond the' flammantia moenia mundi.' The physicist as
such will never ask himself by what influence, external to the
universe, the universe is sustained; simply because he is a
physicist. If, indeed, he be a religious man, he will, of course,
have a very different view of the subject; . . . and this, not
because physical science says anything different, but simply
because it says nothing at all on the subject, nor can do by
the very undertaking with which it set out." Or, as he else-
where sympathetically sums up Bacon's method of pro-
ceeding: II The inquiry into physical causes passes over for
the moment the existence of God. In other words, physical
science is, in a certain sense, atheistic, for the very reason
that it is not theology." 1
2. Science builds up a preli1ninary world that has to be
corrected by Phzlosophy and ReZz'gz.on, at and for thez'r deeper
levels.
The additional experience and analysis of the last half-
century apparently forces us, however, to maintain not only
that Physico-Mathematical Science, and all knowledge
brought strictly to the type of that Science, does not itself
pronounce on the Ultimate Questions; but that this Science,
as such, actually presents us with a picture of reality which,
1 II Christianity and Physical Science" (1855). in Idea of a University,
ed. 1873, pp. 432, 433. II University Teaching" (1852). ibid. p. 222. See
Mr. R. E. Froude's interesting paper. II Scientific Speculation and the
Unity of Truth;. Dublin Review. Oct. 1900. pp. 353-368.
VOL. II. B B
370 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
at the deeper level even of Epistemology and of the more
ultimate Psychology, and still more at that of Religion,
requires to be taken as more or less artificial, and as
demanding, not simply completion, but, except for its own
special purposes, correction as well. Thus we have seen how
M. Bergson finds Clock-Time to be an artificial, compound
concept, which seriously travesties Duration, the reality
actually experienced by us; and Space appears as in even a
worse predicament. 1\'1. Emil Boutroux in France, Dottore
19ino Petrone in Italy, Profs. Eucken and Troeltsch in
Germany, Profs. James Ward and Pringle Pattison in
Great Britain, and Profs. William James, Hugo Münsterberg
and Josiah Royce in America are, in spite of differences
on other points, united in insistence upon, or have even
worked out in much detail, such a distinction between the
first stage and level of Determinist, Atomistic, Inorganic
Nature and our concepts of it, and the second stage and level
of Libertarian, Synthetic, and Organic Spiritual Reality,
and our experience of it. And the penetrating labours of
Profs. Windelband, Rickert, and others, towards building up a
veritable Organon of the Historical Sciences, are bringing into
the clearest relief these two several degrees of Reality and
types of Knowledge, the Historical being the indefinitely
deeper and more adequate, and the one which ultimately
englobes the other. 1
A profoundly significant current in modern philosophy
will thus be brought, in part at least, to articulate expression
and application. This current is well described by Prof.
Volkelt. II German philosophy since Kant reveals, in mani-
fold forms and under various disguises, the attempt to
recognize, in Epistemology, Metaphysics, and Ethics, such
kinds of Certainty, such domains of Being, such human
V olitions and Values, as lie beyond reason, constitute a some-
thing that it cannot grasp, and are rooted in some other kind
of foundation. In variously struggling, indeed stammering
utterances, expression is given to the assurance that not
everything in the world is resolvable into Logic and Thought,
but that mighty resisting remainders are extant, which
perhaps even constitute the most important thing in the
world. . . . Such a longing after such a Reality can be
1 w. Windelband, Geschichte und Naturwissenschaft, 1894. H. Rickert.
Kultut'wissenschaft und Naturwissenschaft. 1899. And, above all. H.
Rickert. Die Grenzen der N aturwissenschaftlichen BegriOsbildung. 1902.
THE SCIENTIFIC HABIT AND MYSTICISM 371
traced in Hamann, Jacobi, Herder, in Novalis, Friedrich
Schlegel, the you thful Schleiermacher, and Jean Paul. Indeed,
even in Hegel, the adorer of Reason, the movement of
Negation, which is the very soul of his philosophy, is, at
bottom, nothing but the Irrational," the Super-Rational,
II element violently pressed into the form of Reason; and
again the single Thing, the This, the Here and the Now, are
felt by him as . . . a something beyond Reason. And has
not the Irrational found expression in Kant, in his doctrines
of the unconditional Liberty of the Will and of Radical Evil?
In the later Schelling and his spiritual relatives the Irrational
has found far more explicit recognition; whilst Schopenhauer
brings the point to its fullest expression. Yet even Nietzsche
still possesses such an element, in his doctrine of the ( Over-
Man.' "1 And in England we find this same element, in
various degrees and in t\VO chief divergent forms, in the
Cambridge Platonists, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Thomas
Hill Green on the one hand; and in Bishop Butler and
Cardinal Newman on the other hand.
We can thus point to much clear recognition, or at least
to a considerable influence, of the profound truth that Science
and Wisdom can each prosper and help and supplement the
other, only if each possesses a certain real autonomy, a power
fully to become and to remain itself, and, in various degrees
and ways, to stimulate, check and thwart the other. And
this truth ever presupposes, what human experience, in the
long run, proves to be a fact,-that the different kinds, spheres,
and levels of man's apprehension, and of the total reality
thus apprehended by him, are already immanently planned
each for the other, within a great, largely dormant system of
the world. Thus l\ian can and should can this congenital
inter-relatedness into ever more vigorous and more fruitful
play; whereas, if it were not already present deep within
the very nature of things, no amount of human effort or
ingenuity could ever evoke or insert it. Prof. V oIkelt has,
as we have seen, illustrated this great fact very strikingly,
with regard to the relation extant between the apparently
sheer contingencies of human History and the requirements
of Philosophy, of normative thought and ideal truth. Yet
a similar interconnection can be traced elsewhere, between
any other two or more levels and spheres of wholesome and
permanent human apprehension and action, in their relation
1 Schopenhauer. 19 00 . pp. 344. 345.
372 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
to various degrees and kinds of reality, as this environs man
or inheres in him.
3. lv T ecessity of the It Thing-element" in Religion.
But let us note that the recognition, of an at all emphatic,
systematic kind, of such inter-relatedness is, so far, almost
limited to the moods and persons preoccupied with the right
claims of Science or of Philosophy upon each other or upon
the remainder of Life; and is, as yet, all but wanting, when
Life is approached from the side of the specifically Religious
requirements and of the Spiritual consolidation of man's soul.
Yet here especially, at by far the most important point of
the whole matter, the unique place and significance of Science
can now be very clearly grasped.
Indeed it is deeply interesting to note how largely the
fundamental characteristics of Gatholicism really meet, or
rather how they strictly require, some such vivid conception
and vigorous use of the Determinist Thing and of its level for
the full constitution of our true depth, our Spiritual Person-
ality itself. If we take, e. g., the criticisms addressed, by so
earnest and acute a mind as the intensely Protestant Emile
Sulze, to the whole Thing-Element and -Concept, as these
are at work in the Catholic practice and position, we shall
find his sense of the difference between Thing and Spirit to
be as enviably keen, and his idea of the end and ultimate
measure of Religion to be as sound and deep, as his con-
ception of the means towards developing Religion and the
Spirit is curiously inadequate.
(r) II Personality," says Sulze, It is, for Religion and Morality,
the supreme Good, of which the source is in God, and the
end, the fruit, and the manifestation is in Man." 1 This I
take to be profoundly true, especially if we insist upon
Perfect Personality being Supreme and Perfect Spirit; and,
again, upon our imperfect personality and spirit as possessed
of certain profound affinities to, and as penetrable and
actually moved by, that Perfect Spirit.
(2) II The value of Personality nowhere finds a full recogni-
tion in Gatholicism; Gatholicism indeed is Pantheism." Now
this harsh judgment is based upon two sets of allegations,
which, though treated by Sulze as of the same nature, are, I
would submit, essentially different, and this because of their
definitely different places and functions in the Gatholic system.
1 Wi, ist der KamPf um die Bedeutung. . . Jesu zu beendigen? 1901.
p. g.
THE SCIENTIFIC HABIT AND MYSTICISl\1: 373
It The Impersonal Godhead, the bond which unites the
three Persons, stands above the Persons. Hence those who
took religion seriously had to lose themselves, pantheistically,
in the abyss of the Divinity. And in Christ the Person was
even looked upon as the product of two Natures, the Divine
and the Human, hence of two Impersonal Forces." 1 Here
two peculiarities in the early Conciliar Definitions are
emphasized, which were doubtless as helpful, indeed necessary,
for the apprehension of the great abiding truths thus conveyed
to the Greco-Roman mind, as they are now in need of
reinterpretation in the light of our greater sensitiveness to the
difference, in character and in value, which obtains between
the concept of Spirit and Personality and that of Substances
and Things.
But Sulze continues, \vithout any change in the kind or
degree of his criticism: II Impersonal miraculous means,
created by the Hierarchy, are put by it in the place of the
sanctifying mutual intercourse of the children of God."
" Christianity, torn away from the religious and moral life,
became thus a special, technical apparatus, \vithout any
religious or spiritual worth. Ecclesiastical Christianity has
become a Pantheism, Materialism, indeed Atheism." 2 We
have so continuously ourselves insisted upon the profound
danger, and frequently operative abuse, of any and all com-
plete apartness between anyone means, function, or attrait of
the spiritual life and the others, that we can, without any
unfairness, restrict ourselves here to the attack upon the
general acceptation of Impersonal means as helps towards
the constitution of Personality. Now Sulze's principle here,
-that only directly personal means can help to achieve the
end of Personality,-is most undoubtedly false, unless Mathe-
matico- Physical Science is also to be ruled out of life, as
necessarily destructive of, or at least as necessarily non-
conductive to, P
rsonality.
(3) Indeed Sulze himself tells us, most truly, that, "for
Religion also, Science is a bath of purification"; and that
" Doctrine and the Sacraments are aids, in the hands of Christ
and of the Community, towards represen ting the riches of their
interior life and offering these to believing hearts." 3 This
latter pronouncement is, however, still clearly insufficient.
1 Wie ist det' KamPf um die Bedeutung. . . Jesu zu beelldzgen? 1901,
p.IO.
a Ibid. pp. 10. II. 3 Ibid. pp. 26, 27.
374 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
For if there is a double truth which, at the end of well-nigh
five centuries, ought to have burnt itself indelibly into the
mind and conscience of us all, it is, surely, the following.
On the one hand, Man, unless he develops a vigorous a]ter-
nating counter-movement, ever grows like to the instruments
of his labour and self-development, and hence, whilst busy
with Things, (whether these be Natural Happenings and their
Sciences, or Religious Institutions and Doctrines,) he inclines
to become, quite unawares, limited and assimilated to them,-
himself thus a Thing among Things, instead of, through
such various Things, winning an ever fuller apprehension of
and growth in Spiritual Personality. Yet, on the other hand,
without such a movement of close contact with the Thing,
(both the intensely concrete, the Here and Now Contingency,
and the profoundly Abstract, the stringent Universal Law,)
and without the pleasure and pain derived from the accom-
panying sense of contraction and of expansion, of contrast,
conflict, supplementation and renovation,-there is no fullest
discipline or most solid growth of the true spiritual Personality.
(4) Thus Science, as Sulze himself clearly sees, not merely
aids us to represent and to communicate our personality
acquired elsewhere, but the shock, friction, contrast, the slow,
continuous discipline, far more, beyond doubt, than any
positive content furnished by such science, can and should
constitute an essential part of the soul's spiritual fertilization.
And similarly, if we move on into the directly religious life,
the Sacramental contacts and Doctrinal systems (the former
so intensely concrete, the latter often so abstract,) are not
simply means towards representing and transmitting spiritu-
ality acquired elsewhere: but they are amongst the means,
and, in some form and degree, the necessary, indeed actually
universal means, towards the awakening and developing and
fulfilling of this our spiritual personality.
4. Three possible relations between Thing and Thought,
Determinisnz and Spirit.
It remains no doubt profoundly true that, with the awaken-
ing of the Mystical sense, will come a more or less acute
consciousness of an at least superficial and preliminary,
difference between this sense, with its specific habits and
informations, and those means and forms, in part so con-
tingent and external, in part so intensely abstract and yet so
precise. But it is equally certain that such a soul, and at such
a stage, even as it continues to require, in some respects more
THE SCIENTIFIC HABIT AND MYSTICISM 375
than ever, for its general balanced development, some of the
irreplaceable discipline and manly, bracing humiliation of the
close external observation and severe abstract generalization
of Science: so also does it continue to require, for the deepen-
ing of the spirit and for the growth of creatureliness, the
contact with religious Things,-the profoundly concrete
Sacraments and the intensely abstract Doctrines of the
religious community.
(r) In one of Trendelenburg's most penetrating essays, he
shows us how, between blind Force and conscious Thought,-
if we presuppose any tendency towards unity to exist between
them,-there can be but three possible relations. II Either
Force stands before Thought, so that Thought is not the
primitive reality, but the result and accident of blind Force;
or Thought stands before Force, so that blind Force is not
itself the primitive reality, but the effluence of Thought;
or finally, Thought and Force are, at bottom, only one and
the same thing, and differ only in our mind's conception of
them." And only one of these three positions can, by any
possibiJity, be the true one: hence their internecine conflict.!
(2) Now Religion, in its normal, central stream, stands most
undoubtedly for Thought before Force, the second, the Theistic
view. And yet it would be profoundly impoverishing for our
outlook and practice, and would but prepare a dangerous
reaction in ourselves or others, were we ever to ignore the
immense influence, in the history, not only of philosophical
speculation, but even of religious feeling and aspiration, not
indeed of the first, the l\Iaterialist, view, (which owes all its
strength to non-religious causes or to a rebound against
religious excesses,) but of the third, the Pantheistic, Monistic}
vie\v, whose classical exponent Spinoza will probably rernain
un to all time.
(3) If we examine into what constitutes the religious
plausibility and power of this view, we shall find, I think, that
it proceeds, above all, from the fact that, only too often, the
second, the Theistic view and practice, leaves almost or quite
out of sight the purification and slow constitution of the
Individual into a Person, by means of the Thing-element, the
apparently blind Determinism of Natural Law and Natural
Happenings. Yet nothing can be more certain than that we
must admit and place this undeniable, increasingly obtrusive
I
1 II Ueber den letzten Unterschied der philosophischen Systeme:. 18 47,
in Beitrå"ge zuy Philosophie. 1855, Vol. II. p. 10.
37 6 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
element and power somewhere in our lives: if we will not own
it as a means, it will grip us as our end. The unpurified, all
but merely natural, animal, lustful and selfish individual man,
is far too like to the brutes and plants, indeed even to the
inorganic substances that so palpably surround him, for it not
to be a fantastic thought to such thinkers as Spinoza, (and
indeed it would be an excessive effort to himself,) to believe
that he is likely, taken simply in this condition, to outlast, and
is capable of dominating, the huge framework of the visible
world, into which his whole bodily and psychical mechanism
is placed, and to which it is bound by a thousand ties and
closest similarities: his little selfish thinkings cannot but
seem mere bubbles on a boundless expanse of mere matter;
all creation cannot, surely, originate in, depend from, and
move up to, a Mind and Spirit in any way like unto this
trivial ingenuity.
(4) It is true, of course, that Spinoza ended,-as far as the
logic of his system went,-by" purifying" away not only this
animal Individualism, but Spiritual Personality as well, and
this because he takes Mathematico-Physical concepts to be
as directly appJicable and as adequate to Ultimate Reality
as are the Ethico-Spiritual categories. We have then to
admit that even so rich and rare, so deeply religious a spirit
as Spinoza could insist upon purification by the" preliminary
Pantheism," and ye t could remain, in theory, the eager exponent
of an ultimate Pantheism. Like the Greeks, he not only
passes through a middle distance, a range of experience which
appears dominated by austere Fate and blind Fortune, but
finds Fate even in ultimate Reality. Whilst, however, the
Greeks often thought of Fate as superior even to the Gods,
Spinoza finds Ultimate Reality to be neither Nature nor
Spirit, but simply Being in General, with a Law which is
neither Natural nor Spiritual Law, but Law in general. This
General Being and General Law then bifurcate, with the
most rigorous determinism and complete impartiality, step
by step, into parallel and ever co-present manifestations
of Nature and of Spirit, and of their respective laws, which,
though different, are also each strictly determined within
their own series. 1
(5) But Spinoza's error here undoubtedly lies in his de facto
1 See the admirably lucid analysis in Prof. Troeltsch's II Religions-philo-
sophie," in Die PhilosoPhie im Beginn des zwanzigsten J ahrhunderts. 19 0 4.
Vol. I. p. 116, already referred to further back.
THE SCIENTIFIC HABIT AND MYSTICISM 377
violent bending (in spite of this theoretical Parallelism) of
all Knowledge, Reality, and Life, under the sole Mathematico-
Physical categories and method; and in the insistence upon
attaining to ultimate Truth by one single bound and with com-
plete adequacy and clearness. And the greatness here consists
in the keen and massive sense of three profound truths. He
never forgets that l\fathematico-Physical Science is rigidly
determinist, and that it stands for a certain important truth
and penetrates to a certain depth of reality. He never ceases
to feel how impure, selfish, petty is the natural man, and how
pure, disinterested, noble, can and should be the spiritual
personality. And he never lets go the sense that, someho\v,
that science must be able to help towards this purification.
(6) Now these three truths must be preserved, whi1st the
Mathematico-Physical one-sidedness and the II one-step" error
must be carefully eliminated. And indeed it is plain that
only by such elimination can those truths operate within a
fully congenial system. For only thus, with a dissimilarity
between the Ultimate, Libertarian, Spiritual Reality, and the
Intermediate, Determinist, Physico-Mathematical Range, can
we explain and maintain the pain, not only of the selfish but
also of the true self, in face the l\iere Thing; and only thus
is all such pain and trouble worth having, since only thus it
leads to the fuller development and the solid constitution of
an abiding, interior, mental and volitional Personality.
5. Purification of the Personality by the i1nþersonal.
Prof. H. J. Holtzmann has got an eloquent page con-
cerning the kind of Dualism which is more than ever
desirable for souls, if they would achieve a full and virile
personality in this our day. "It would appear to be the wiser
course for us to recognize the incompatibility between merely
natural existence and truly personal life, just as it is, in its
whole acute non-reconciliation; to insert this conflict into our
complete outlook on to Life in its full breadth and depth, and
to find the harmonization in God the Infinite, in whom alone
such parallels can meet, and not deliberately to blind our right
eye or our left, in order to force that outlook into one single
aspect,-a degree of unification which, when achieved in this
violent manner, would mean for us, at the same time, a point
of absolute inertia, of eternal stagnation." And he then shows
how it is precisely the interaction within our minds, feelings,
and volitions, of, on the one hand, the boundless world of
nature, with its majestic impersonality, and on the other hand,
378 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
the inexhaustible, indefinitely deeper realm of personal life,
as it appears within the stream of human history, which is
best adapted to give us some fuller glimpses of the greatness
of God and of the specific character of religion. 1
The religious imagination, mind, heart, and will,-that is to
say, the complete, fully normal human being at his deepest,-
has thus been more and more forced, by an increasingly
articulated experience of the forces and requirements of actual
life, to hold and to practise, with ever-renewed attempts at their
most perfect interstimulation and mutual supplementation, a
profoundly costing, yet immensely fruitful, trinity in unity of
convictions on this point.
In every time, place, and race, man will continue to be or
to become religious, in proportion to his efficacious faith in,
and love of, the overflowing reality and worth of the great
direct objects of religion,-God and the soul, and their inter-
relation in and through the Kingdom of God, the Church,
and its Divine-Human Head,-the whole constituting God's
condescension towards and immanence in man, and man's
response and orientation towards the transcendent God.
And again, in every age, place, and race, man will be or
will become deeply religious, in proportion to the keenness
with which he realizes the immense need of spiritual growth
and purification for his, at best, but inchoate personality.
But,-and this third point we must admit, in the precise
extension and application given to it here, to be character-
istically modern,-man will, (if he belongs to our time and
to our Western races, and is determined fully to utilize our
special circumstances, lights and trials, as so many means
towards his own spiritualization,) have carefuIJy to keep in
living touch with that secondary and preliminary reality,
the Thing-world, the Impersonal Element, Physical Science
and Determinist Law. He will have to pass and repass
beneath these Caudine forks; to plunge and to replunge into
and through this fiery torrent; and, almost a merely animal
individual at the beginning and on this side of such docile
bendings and such courageous plungings, he will, (if he com-
bines them with, and effects them through, those two other,
abiding and ultimate, directly religious convictions,) straighten
himself up again to greater heights, and will come forth from
the torrent each time a somewhat purer and more developed
1 Richard Rothe's Spekulatives System. 1899. pp. 205. 206.
THE SCIENTIFIC HABIT AND MYSTICISM 379
spiritual person than he was before such contraction and
purgation.
6. This position new for Science, not for Religion.
Yet even this third point has, if we ",ill but look to its
substantial significance and religious function, been equiva-
lently held and practised ever since the Twice-Born life, the
deeper religion, has been lived at all.
(r) The Ascetic's self-thwarting, and the Mystic's self-
oblivion and seeking after Pure Love, what are they but the
expressions of the very same necessities and motives which
we would wish to see fully operative here? For we are not,
of course, here thinking of anything simply intellectual, and
fit only for the educated few. Any poor laundry-girl, who
carefully studies and carries out the laws of successful
washing, who moves, in alternation, away from this concen-
tration on the Thing, to recollection and increasingly affective
prayer and rudimentary contemplation, and who seeks the
fuller growth of her spirit and of its union with God, in this
coming and going, to and from the Visible and Contingent, to
and from the Spiritual and Infinite, and in what these several
levels have of contrast and of conflict; or any lowly farm-
labourer or blacksmith or miner, who would proceed simiJarly
with his external determinist mechanical work, and with his
deeply internal requirements and spiritual growth and con-
solidation: would all be carrying out precisely what is here
intended.
(2) As a matter of fact, the source of such novelty, as may
be found here, is not on the side of religion, but on that of
science. For the conception of Nature of the ancient Greek
Physicists, and indeed that of Aristotle, required to be pro-
foundlyde-humanized, de-sentimentalized: a rigorous mathe-
matical Determinism and soulless l\iechanism became the
right and necessary ideal of Physical Science. But, long
before the elaboration of this concept of the ruthless Thing
and of its blind Force, Our Lord had, by His Life and
Teaching, brought to man, with abidingly unforgettable,
divine depth and vividness, the sense of Spirit and Personality,
with its liberty and interiority, its far-looking wisdom and
its regenerating, creative power of love. And for some
thirteen centuries after this supreme spiritual revelation and
discovery, that old anthropomorphic and anthropocentric
conception of the Physical Universe continued, well-nigh
unchanged, even among the earlier and middle schoolmen,
380 THE MYSTIGAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
and was readily harmonized with that Spiritual world. Yet
they were harmonized, upon the whole, by a juxtaposition
which, in proportion as the conception of Nature became
Determinist and Mechanical, has turned out more and more
untenable; and which, like all simple juxtapositions, could
not, as such, have any spiritually educative force. But Spiritual
Reality has now,-for those who have become thoroughly
awake to the great changes operated, for good and all, in
man's conception of the Physical Universe during now three
centuries,-to be found under, behind, across these Physical
Phenomena and Laws, which both check and beckon on the
mind and soul of man, in quest of their ultimate mainstay
and motivation.
(3) And let us note how much some such discipline and
asceticism is required by the whole Christian temper and
tradition, and the weakening of some older forms of it.
During the first three generations Christians were pro-
foundly sobered by the keen expectation of Our Lord's
proximate Second Coming, and of the end of the entire
earthly order of things, to which all their natural affections
spontaneously clung; and again and again, up to well-
nigh the Crusading Age, this poignant and yet exultant
expectation seized upon the hearts of Christians. And then,
especially from St. Augustine's teaching onwards, an all-
pervading, frequently very severe, conviction as to the
profound effects of Original Sin, a pessimistic turning away
from the future of this sub-lunar world, as leading up to the
great Apostacy, and a concentration upon Man's pre-historic
beginnings, as incomparably eclipsing all that mankind would
ever achieve here below, came and largely took the place, as
the sobering, detaching element in Christianity, of the vivid
expectation of the Parousia which had characterized the
earlier Christian times.
Clearly, the Parousia and the Original Sin conception have
ceased to exercise their old, poignantly detaching power upon
us. Yet we much require some such special channel and
instrument for the preservation and acquisition of the abso-
lutely essential temper of Detachment and Other-Worldliness.
I think that this instrument and channel of purification and
detachment-if we have that thirst for the More and the
Other than al] things visible can give to our souls, (a thirst
which the religious sense alone can supply and without
which we are religiously but half-awake,)-is offered to us
THE SCIENTIFIC HABIT AND MYSTICISM 38r
now by Science, in the sense and for the reasons already
described.
7. Three kinds of occupation with Science.
Let the reader note that thus, and, I submit, thus only, we
can and do enlist the religious passion itself on the side of
disinterested, rightly autonomous science. For thus the
harmony between the different aspects and levels of life is
not, (except for our general faith in its already present
latent reality, and in its capacity for ultimate full realization
and manifestation,) the static starting-point or automatically
persisting fact in man's life; but it is, on the contrary, his
ever difficult, never completely realized goal,-a goal which
can be reached only by an even greater transformation within
the worker than within the materials worked upon by him,-
a transformation in great part effected by the enlargement
and purification, incidental to the inclusion of that large
range of Determinist Thing-laws and experiences within the
Spirit's Libertarian, Personal life.
It is plain that there are three kinds and degrees of occu-
pation with Things and Science, and with their special level
of tnIth and reality; and that in proportion as their practice
within, and in aid of, the spiritual life is difficult, in the
same proportion, (given the soul's adequacy to this particular
amount of differentiation and pressure,)-is this practice
purifying. And though but fe\v souls will be called to any
appreciable amount of activity within the third degree, all
souls can be proved, I think, to require a considerable amount
of the first two kinds, whilst mankind at large most un-
doubtedly demands careful, thorough work of all three
sorts.
The first kind is that of the man with a hobby. His
directly religious acts and his toilsome bread -winning will
thus get relieved and alternated by, say, a little Botany or a
little Numismatics, or by any other U safe" science, taken
in a II safe" dose, in an easy, dilettante fashion, for purposes
of such recreation. This kind is already in fairly general
operation, and is clearly useful in its degree and way, but
it has, of course, no purificatory force at all.
The second kind is that of the man whose profession is
some kind of science which has, by now, achieved a more
or less secure place alongside of, or even within, religious
doctrines and feelings, -such as Astronomy or Greek Archae-
ology. Here the purification will be in proportion to the
382 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT O:F RELIGION
loyal thoroughness with which he fully maintains, indeed
develops, the special characteristics and autonomy both of these
Sciences, as the foreground, part-material and stimulation,
and of Religion, as the groundwork, background and ultimate
interpreter and moulder of his complete and organized life;
and with \vhich he makes each contribute to the development
of the other and of the entire personality, its apprehensions
and its work. This second kind is still comparatively rare,
doubtless, in great part, because of the considerable cost and
the lifelong practice and training involved in what readily
looks like a deliberate complicating and endangering of
things, otherwise, each severally, simple and safe.
And the third kind is that of him whose systematic mental
activity is devoted to some science or research, which is still
in process of winning full and peaceful recognition by official
Theology,-say, Biological Evolution or Biblical Criticism.
Here the purificatioJ1 will, for a soul capable of such a strain,
be at its fullest, provided such a soul is deeply moved by, and
keeps devotedly faithful to, the love of God, and of man, of
humble labour and of self-renouncing purification, and, within
this great ideal and determination, maintains and ameliorates
with care the methods, categories and tests special both to
these sciences and investigations, and to their ultimate
interpretation and utilization in the philosophy and life of
religion. For here there will, as yet, be no possibility of so
shunting the scientific activity on to one side, or of limiting
it to a carefully pegged-out region, as to let Religion and
Science energize as forces of the same kind and same level,
the same clearness and same finality; but the Science will
here have to be passed through, as the surface-level, on the
way to Religion as underlying all. What would otherwise
readily tend to become, as it were, a mental Geography,
would thus here give way to what might be pictured as a
spiritual Geology.
8. Historical Science, Religion's present, but not ultÍ1nate,
probleln.
The reader will have noted that, for each of these three
stages, I have taken an Historico-Cultural as well as a
Mathematico-Physical Science, though I am well aware of
the profound difference between them, both as to their
pre-requisites and method, and their aim and depth. And,
again, I know well that, for the present, the chief intellectual
difficulty of Religion, or at least the main conflict or friction
THE SCIENTIFIC HABIT AND MYSTICISM 383
between the Sciences and Theology, seems to proceed, not
from Physical Science but from Historical Criticism, especially
as applied to the New Testament, so that, on this ground
also, I ought, apparently, to keep these two types of Science
separate.- Y et it is clear, I think, that, however distinct,
indeed different, should be the methods of these two sorts
of Science, they are in so far alike, if taken as a means of
purification for the soul bent upon its own deepening, that
both require a slow, orderly, disinterested procedure, capable
of fruitfulness only by the recurring sacrifice of endless petty
self-seekings and obstinate fancies, and this in face of that
natural eagerness and absoluteness of mind which strong
religious emotions will, unless they too .be disciplined and
purified, only tend to increase and stereotype.
The matters brought up by Historical Criticism for the
study and readjustment of Theology, and for utilization by
Religion, are indeed numerous and in part difficult. Yet the
still more general and fundamental alternatives lie not here,
but with the questions as to the nature and range of Science
taken in its narrower sense,-as concerned with Quantity,
Mechanism, and Determinism alone.
If Science of this Thing-type be all that, in any manner
or degree, we can apprehend in conformity with reality or
can live by fruitfully: then History and Religion of every
kind must be capable of a strict assimilation to it, or they
lnust go. But if such Science constitute only one kind, and,
though the clearest and most easily transferable, yet the least
deep, and the least adequate to the ultimate and spiritual
reality, among the chief levels of apprehension and of life
which can be truly experienced and fruitfully lived by man;
and if the Historical and Spiritual level can be shown to find
room for, indeed to require, the Natural and Mechanical level,
whilst this latter, taken as ultimate, cannot accommodate, but
is forced to crush or to deny, the former: then a refusal to
accept more than can be expressed and analyzed by such
Physico-Mathematical Science would be an uprooting and a
discrown ing of the fuller life, and would ignore the complete
human personality, from one of whose wants the entire
impulse to such Science took its rise.
As a matter of fact, we find the following three alternatives.
Level an down to Mathematico-Physical Science, and you
deny the specific constituents of Spirituality, and you render
impossible the growth of the Person out of, and at the eÀpense
384 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
of, the Individual. Proclaim the Person and its Religion, as
though they were static substances adequately present from
the first, and ignore, evade or thwart that Thing-level and
method as far as ever you can, and you will, in so far, keep
back the all but simply animal Individual from attaining to
his full spiritual Personality. But let grace wake up, in such
an Individual, the sense of the specific characteristics of
Spirituality and the thirst to become a full and ever fuller
Person, and this in contact and conflict with, as well as in
recollective abstraction from, the apparently chance contin-
gencies of History and Criticism, and the seemingly fatalistic
mechanisms of Physics and Mathematics: and you will be
able, by humility, generosity, and an ever-renewed alternation
of such outgoing, dispersive efforts and of such incoming re-
collection and affective prayer, gradually to push out and to
fill in the outlines of your better nature, and to reorganize it
all according to the Spirit and to Grace, becoming thus a
deep man, a true personality.
Once again: take the intermediate, the Thing-level as final,
and you yourself sink down more and more into a casual
Thing, a soulless Law; Materialism, or, at best, some kind of
Pantheism, must become your practice and your creed.-Take
the anterior, the Individual-level as final, and you will remain
something all but stationary, and if not merely a Thing yet
not fully a Person; and if brought .face to face with many an
Agnostic or Pantheist of the nobler sort, who is in process of
purification from such childish se]f-centredness by means of
the persistently frank and vivid apprehension of the Mechani-
cal, Determinist, Thing-and-Fate level of experience and
degree of truth, you will, even if you have acquired certain
fragmentary convictions and practices of religion, appear
strangely less, instead of more, than your adversary, to any
one capable of equitably comparing that Agnostic and your-
self-you who, if Faith be right, ought surely to be not less
but more of a personality than that non-believing soul.
But take the last, the Spiritual, Personal level as alone ulti-
mate, and yet as necessarily requiring, to be truly reached and
maintained, that the little, selfish, predominantly animal-
minded, human being should ever pass and repass from this,
his Individualistic plane and attitude, through the Thing-and-
Fate region, out and on to the U shining table-land, whereof
our God Himself is sun and moon": and YOlJ will, in time,
gain a depth and an expansion, a persuasive force, an har-
THE SCIENTIFIC HABIT AND MYSTICISM 385
moniousness and intelligibleness with which, everything else
being equal, the Pantheistic or Agnostic self-renunciation
cannot truly compare. For, in these circumstances, the latter
type will, at best, but prophesy and prepare the consummation
actually reached by the integrational, dynamic religiousness,
the Individual transformed more and more into Spirit and
Person, by the help of the Thing and of Determinist Law.
Freedom, Interiority, Intelligence, Will, Grace, and Love, the
profoundest Personality, a reality out of all proportion more
worthy and more ultimate than the most utterly unbounded
universe of a simply material kind could ever be, thus appear
here, in full contradiction of Pantheism, as ultimate and
abiding; and yet all that is great and legitimate in Pantheism
has been retained, as an intermediate element and stage, of a
deeply purifying kind.
9. Return to Saints John of the Cross and Catherin.e of
Genoa.
And thus we come back to the old, sublime wisdom of St.
John of the Cross, in all that it has of continuous thirst after
the soul's purification and expansion, and of a longing to lose
itself, its every pettiness and egoistic separateness, in an
abstract, universal, quasi-impersonal disposition and reality,
such as God here seems to require and to offer as the means
to Himself. Only that now we have been furnished, by
the ever-clearer self-differentiation of Mathematico-Physical
Science, with a zone of pure, sheer Thing, mere soulless Law,
a zone capable of absorbing all those elements from out of
our thought and feeling which, if left freely to mingle with
the deeper level of the growing Spiritual Personality, would
give to this an unmistakably Pantheistic tinge and trend.
Hence, now the soul will have, in one of its two latter
movements, to give a close attention to contingent facts and
happenings and to abstract laws, possessed of no direct
religious significance or interpretableness which, precisely
because of this, will, if practised as part of the larger whole
of the purificatory, spiritual upbuilding of the soul, in no
way weaken, but stimulate and furnish materials for the
other movement, the one specially propounded by the great
Spaniard, in which the soul turns away, from all this
particularity, to a general recollection and contemplati"\Ve
prayer.
And we are thus, perhaps, in even closer touch with
Catherine's central idea,-the soul's voluntary plunge into
VOL. II. C C
386 THE MYSTIOAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
a painful yet joyous purgation, into a state, and as it were
an element, which purges away, (since the soul itself freely
accepts the process,) all that deflects, stunts, or weakens the
realization of the soul's deepest longings,-the hard self-
centredness, petty self-mirrorings, and jealous claimfulness,
above all. For though, in Gatherine's conception, this at first
both painful and joyfw, and then more and more, and at last
entirely, joyful, ocean of light and fire is directly God and
His effects upon the increasingly responsive and unresisting
soul: yet the apparent Thing-quality here, the seemingly
ruthless Determinism of Law, in which the little individual is
lost for good and all, and which only the spiritual personality
can survive, are impressively prominent throughout this great
scheme. And though we cannot, of course, take the element
and zone of the sheer Thing and of Determinist Law as God,
or as directly expressive of His nature, yet we can and must
hold it, (in what it is in itself, in what it is as a construction
of our minds, and in its purificatory function and influence
upon our unpurified but purifiable souls,) to come from God
and to lead to Him. And thus here also we escape any touch
of ultimate Pantheism, without falling into any cold Deism
or shallow Optimism. For just because we retain, at the
shallower level, the ruthlessly impersonal element, can we, by
freely willed, repeated passing through such fatalistic-seeming
law, become, from individuals, persons; from semi-things,
spirits,-spirits more and more penetrated by and a pprehensi ve
of the Spirit, God, the source and sustainer of all this growth
and reality.
And yet, let us remember once more, the foreground and
preliminary stage to even the sublimest of suchlives will never,
here below at least, be abidingly transcended, or completely
harmonized with the groundwork and ultimate stage, by the
human personality. Indeed our whole contention has been
that, with every conceivable variation of degree, of kind, and
of mutual relation, these two stages, and some sort of friction
between them, are necessary, throughout this life, for the full
development, the self-discipline, and the adequate consolida-
tion, at the expense of the childish, sophistic individual, of
the true spiritual Personality.
THE THREE ELEMENTS OF RELIGION 387
IV. FINAL SUMMARY AND RETURN TO THE STARTING-
POINT OF THE WHOLE INQUIRY: THE NECESSITY,
AND YET THE ALMOST INEVITABLE MUTUAL Hos-
TILITY, OF THE THREE GREAT FORCES OF THE SOUL
AND OF THE THREE GORRESPONDING ELEMENTS OF
RELIGION.
Our introductory position as to the three great forces of
the soul, with the corresponding three great elements of
religion, appears, then, to have stood the test of our detailed
investigation. For each of these forces and corresponding
elements has turned out to be necessary to religion, and yet
to become destructive of itself and of religion in general
where this soul-force and religious element is allowed gravely
to cripple, or all but to exclude, the other forces and elements,
and their vigorous and normal action and influence.
I. Each of these three forces and elements is indeed necessary.
but ruinously destructive where it more or less ousts the other
two.
(I) The psychic force or faculty by which we remember
and picture things and scenes; the law of our being which
requires that sense-impressions should stimulate our thinking
and feeling into action, and that symbols, woven by the
picturing faculty out of these impressions, should then express
these our thoughts and feelings; and the need we have, for
the due awakening, discipline and supplementation of every
kind and degree of experience and action, that social tradition,
social environment, social succession should ever be before
and around and after our sing1e lives: correspond to and
demand the Institutional and Historical Element of Religion.
This element is as strictly necessary as are that force and
that law.
Yet if this force and need of the soul, and this religious
element are allowed to emasculate the other two primary
soul-forces and needs and the religious elements corresponding
to them, it win inevitably degenerate into more or less of a
Superstition,-an oppressive materialization and dangerous
would-be absolute fixation of even quite secondary and tem-
porary expressions and analyses of religion; a ruinous belief
in the direct transferableness of religious conviction; and a
predominance of political, legal, physically coercive concepts
and practices with regard to those most interior, strong yet
388 THE MYSTIGAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION
delicate, readily thwarted or weakened, springs of all moral
and religious character,-spiritual sincerity and spontaneity
and the liberty of the children of God. We thus get too
great a preponderance of the U Objective," of Law and Thing,
as against Conviction and Person; of Priest as against Pro-
phet; of the movement from without inwards, as against the
movements from within outwards.
The Spanish Inquisition we found to be probably the most
stliking example and warning here. Yet the Eastern Christian
Churches have doubtless exhibited these symptoms, if less
acutely, yet more extensively and persistently. And the
Protestant Reformation-Movement, (even in the later lives
of its protagonists, Luther, Zwingli, and Calvin,) much of
orthodox Lutheranism and Calvinism, and some forms and
phases of Anglican Highchurchism and of Scotch Presby-
terianism, show various degrees and forms of a similar one-
sidedness. In Judaism the excesses in the Priestly type of
Old Testament religion, especially as traceable after the Exile,
and their partial continuation in Rabbinism, furnish other,
instructive instances of such more or less partial growth,-
the Pharisees and the Jerusalem Sanhedrin being here the
funest representatives of the spirit in question. The classical
Heathen Roman religion was, throughout, too Naturalistic
for its, all but exclusive, externalism and legalism to be felt
as seriously oppressive of any other, considerable element
of that religion. And much the sa